Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Open Media

  • The only text messages you’ll ever need to send

    Text messages — who needs them?  Although I’ve always been an early adopter, I find that I almost never send text messages. More generally, I haven’t yet gotten a smartphone and don’t really feel like I’m missing out.  It’s funny. A lot of people get into sending clever text messages or participating in a threaded chat on their iphones,  but I’ll have none of that.

    Here are the only text messages that I have sent or ever will send:

    • Arrived home.
    • The panel will be at  Ballroom B. (This actually is the first text I ever sent).
    • Ok/thanks.
    • Meeting has been changed to 9:45 AM
    • Still alive.
    • Class is cancelled.
    • Running late. Expect to arrive at 2:25.
    • Please order me the Kung Pao Chicken
    • Feel like talking?
    • Feel like playing tennis?
    • Yes, I’ll attend.
    • Call me.
    • Call me  ASAP.
    • Do you have a stapler?
    • Address is 6121 Winsome Apt 7B.
    • Can you pick up the kids?
    • Do you already own this (include photo of product at store)
    • I’ll remain here until 11:00 PM.
    • Don’t forget to feed the dog.
    • Joanna isn’t here yet and not answering her phone. What’s up?
    • How much does it cost?
    • Can’t talk.   Too Busy.

    You’ll notice that the text messages listed above have a single purpose and impart usually one fact.  Texters should stick to these kind of task-oriented messages. The shorter you make  the text, the more likely people can misunderstand or take something the wrong way. You can’t express feelings except in a stereotypical way — you might as well just send an emoticon.  Also because text messages have a tendency to pile up, you can miss one message and totally miss out on the texter’s intentions.  True communication shouldn’t be this confusing and unwieldy.

    I used to do chat via yahoo and skype. I still do occasionally, but for the most part, I find that it is a time-consuming and grueling way to conduct a conversation. Probably the most common text I send via skype is “Do you want to talk by telephone?” Typing and waiting for other people to type replies requires a lot of effort and patience. And I speak as someone who is perfectly comfortable typing thoughts rather than saying them.

    Actually, skype is good when crossing time zones and doing brief technical interviews. The interview subject or technical support person can drop links into a chat window and paste troubleshooting information. That’s a situation where it works.

    Before the Internet became big and affordable, web chat allowed you to communicate in real time with people far away.  Sure, it was fun. I enjoyed chatting with former students in Eastern Europe. Sometimes we had in-depth conversations via web chat. But that was on a computer and back in the days that Internet phone calls still weren’t practical. I won’t deny that text chat sometimes brought web conversations in unintended directions, but for a the most part it was nothing more than a lousy substitute for voice chat.

    Text messages can help in certain contexts, especially situations where there is no free wifi access or where the noise level is too loud.  I was once at a nightclub where the noise level was so loud that I would never be able to hear the person calling; Text-messaging was the perfect solution. The ability to share photos and start group threads on texting platforms is helpful. But phones are an inferior device for typing and reading  (and storing) texts. Maybe it’s ok for making plans, but a phone call can resolve a lot of the details much faster than  text messages can.  Also, texting isn’t an appropriate way to have a deep  conversation or  communicate anger or love.  I debated whether I would include two other messages on my list: “I love you” and “I’ll pray for you.”  I understand that some people may prefer using these kinds of phrases often, but for me it is way too perfunctory a context to  make these expressions. If you love somebody, dammit there are better ways to express it than by  a text message. (If I recall correctly, a driver  in the famous anti-texting video who texted before causing a fatal car crash had been sending his girlfriend the text,  “I love you.”)

    You will notice that most of these text messages I listed here require only one or two followups (if that much!)  You want to receive text messages only when you think there is a time-sensitive reason to be interrupted from your job or nap. Interruptions are not really good things.  The bell or beep announcing the arrival of a text message might seem inconsequential and not really distracting, but to have any kind of extended chat means having to sit through a parade of unending beeps that announce yet another uninteresting message.  Sure, if both parties are in different places and have time to kill, then it’s a pleasant diversion.

    Text messages might be part of a successful dating/courtship ritual — although I’m way past high school and college dating situations where I might experience this phenomenon first hand.   I’m not talking about sexy poses or lewd messages. I’m talking about photos or videos or the occasional joking remark.  I once had an ill-fated long distance relationship before the time of webcams and camera phones. Phone calls were still extraordinarily expensive; I’m not saying that anything could have saved the situation (probably not), but photos and video  might have given things more immediacy. It might have given one  person better insight into the other person’s thought processes. Instead, she and I were talking to one another on a 35 cent per minute international phone line even though  I’m not sure we were really   communicating.  But compared to a bland text message, a voice conversation is practically a psychotherapy session.  A phone call can convey attitude and emotional level.

    I’m all in favor of people having several different tools to help them communicate. The more, the merrier. My problem with texting is that it’s a last resort method of communication which nowadays people are starting to use as  a first resort.  The historical curiosity about text messages is that they grew independently  from email and web chat because phone providers refused to make them interoperable. They started out as single platform and only later became interoperable with other phone platforms (but generally not web-based ones).   Texting is also  used as a bonus promotional feature to encourage people to buy more expensive cell phone plans.  Texting — like snapchat — is designed for ephemeral conversations. I doubt people would want to save their phone chat sessions or that phone providers would make this easy.  Sure, there are privacy reasons why you might want texting sessions to disappear, but the user should always have this  option to save.  I have a hard time believing that most  texting sessions are interesting enough even to be worth saving. And if something is not interesting enough to save, why bother doing it at all?

    September 2021 Update. I actually did buy a smartphone 3 months after writing this post. But it’s funny how rarely I have sent text messages or shared multimedia over the years. Only on one occasion would I have called text-messaging to be indispensable. In February 2021 a winter freeze caused power outages everywhere, and cell phones were still barely able functional. You couldn’t make or receive phone calls, but it was still possible to send and receive text messages because they were so low bandwidth and asynchronous.

    Here’s a new acronym I invented when you think it is better to handle the matter with voice rather with text. TITASPEED: Texting Is Too Awkward; Speech Produces Easy Effective Decisions.

  • Why Facebook is no longer relevant to content creators (or readers!)

    A few months ago, Facebook  did something so shocking and stupid that it left me no choice but to leave Facebook. For good.

    Up until that time I have enjoyed Facebook for what it is. It’s a great way to keep up with friends from school and work and overseas. Frankly, I have avoided these kinds of social media web apps, but the first tipoff that FB  was actually useful came when Texas uberblogger Gary Denton announced that he was abandoning his Easter Lemming blogs in order to focus on Facebook. Amazing! Soon, too, I found a lot of the same link-sharing which I normally did on my blog could  be done just as easily on Facebook — and more people would read it too. I also found that I was learning about lots of new URLs and essays through Facebook which I’d normally learn about through bloggers. Suddenly FB was a better source for content than bloggers were.

    If you think of it, Facebook is nothing more than a microblogging platform with a little bit of messaging and relationship management  thrown in. It’s not rocket science,  and for news junkies and readers, you could follow lots of people and content sources by RSS feeds. But most Americans never paid attention to RSS feeds, plus you had lots of news sources not allowing full feeds (a real pain for readers). Even when things started moving into mobile platforms, few people used naked RSS readers, instead obtaining their content by “Liking” things on Facebook or using an intermediary like Flipboard to browse through cool stuff.

    I could talk about some things which annoyed me about Facebook. (such as everchanging privacy controls, unsafe third party apps and difficulty suppressing trolls and promiscuous posters). But for the most part FB was doing many things right. More importantly, 2 or 3 years ago Facebook introduced a personal archive of your data which you can download for safekeeping.

    Swell. Every two or three months I would request another personal archive to be made, and shortly thereafter I would receive via email a link to a zip file containing my data in html form. This is a case where everything worked exactly as expected. All my data was there and easy to find offline. I could easily refer to it and look things up on it. I found that I did that often. I posted some of my things onto Facebook  just in case.

    But around June 2013, I began to notice that the latest zip of the FB archives was missing stuff. At first, I attributed it to a bug. Facebook is a gigantic system always in flux, and I had read reports that the archiving feature was causing problems for many users. Give it time, I thought.

    Then, I noticed that my latest personal archive no longer included the URLs to the links I was making to my facebook posts. Let me explain. One “trick” about Facebook is that when you paste a link into the posting space, FB will automatically discover the Title, Summary and preview image of the link in question. In fact, you can even delete the URL you posted and Facebook will still keep the link in your wall post. It’s a really cool thing, and if you think about it, why does the tiny wallpost form need to include URLs when you already have the preview as a hyperlink?

    I had been embedding links into Facebook wall posts that way for over a year now. But now I discover that not only were my personal archives missing comments from others, Facebook had also stripped out every single link I had added.  It had also removed all my friends’  comments by friends to my posts as well as my own comments. Bastards!

    The Old Facebook Archives

    Here is what the old Personal Archives used to look like for my wall. In this particular screenshot you don’t see comments by others, but in fact, specific posts in my archives do include comments by others (depending on their privacy settings).

    fb-good-archive-debate

    The “New and Improved” Personal Facebook Archive

    Stripped of all my links, none of the posts make sense, and my own comments are removed.

    fb-bad-archive-debate

    My original descriptions are there, only the links are nowhere to be seen!

    There is a way to keep the URls so that they can (for now) be included in personal archives. That is to leave the URL’s in the status bar. But even when you do this, the links themselves will no longer be “clickable.”

    Furthermore, comments are removed totally from the archives. I can understand not showing comments by OTHERS (if it conflicts with a user’s privacy settings). But I do not understand why it has removed MY OWN COMMENTS to MY OWN POSTS!

    Again, the personal archive from last year did EVERYTHING perfectly. Now let’s look at the monstrosity that motivated FB to ruin its own archiving capability.

    Facebook Activity Log: Disaster in search of a problem

    Facebook introduced something called the Activity Log. I don’t know why they did it; I’m sure there is some crass commercial motivation behind it; never mind about that.

    The fig leaf behind this function is that it’s supposed to make it easier for users to look up past posts. This is a worthy goal; Facebook has always been horrible about having to look up anything older than a week old. I have probably spent hours continuously clicking the More button just to find some link I posted a few months ago.

    But here’s the thing. When FB introduced the Activity log, it seems that that they also crippled the personal archive.

    Now let’s look at that some post I made about the presidential debate in the Activity Log.

    facebook-activity

    Everything is posted in unthreaded reverse chronological order without including user comments, making it practically impossible to understand the context of the original remarks.

    That means: if you posted on a controversial topic on Friday and on Tuesday someone makes a comment on that same thread (or maybe you do too), any of your other activity in the intervening time will be mixed in with it.

    Facebook has a helpful table describing exactly how they are screwing you. Here is the relevant listing of what from your wall posts they will be saving:

    facebook-table

     

    What’s the Alternative?

    Facebook is where everyone is at, so we can’t just leave Facebook willy-nilly, can we?

    Or can we?

    Google Plus is a newer and cleaner alternative to Facebook. It is not as full featured as Facebook (and doesn’t have 1/10 of the users), but it has some other cool features. Plus, you can’t beat it as an integrated solution.

    More relevant to today’s post, Google has made a full commitment to data liberation. Here’s what they say:

    For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:

    1. Can I get my data out in an open, interoperable, portable format?
    2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
    3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

    The ideal answers to these questions are:

    1. Yes.
    2. Nothing more than I’m already paying.
    3. As little as possible.

    Google Plus has a free service called Google Takeout which lets you export ALL of your data out of the web application. That includes not only Google Plus, but also Google Docs, Blogger, etc.  I haven’t played that much with Google Takeout, except that it does exactly what it says it does. I noticed that Google Plus archives are exported as individual html files. So your archive will accumulate dozens (if not hundreds)  So each individual post is a separate html file. That is inconvenient, yes, but at least I’m not losing any data here. Sure, it’s not as easy to search through in offline mode, but a single grep command in linux  or a good text editor could probably help you find what you want easily.

    For me as a writer, I want to keep a record of as much as possible. I never gave free web apps the right to hide my own data from me. It no longer makes sense to use Facebook if I can no longer know for sure if I can export my data outside of Facebook.

    The Post-Facebook and Post-Google-Plus Era

    I jumped pretty quickly  onto blogging and  other web services. Probably in about 2006-8, things changed. Smart phones came and with that came producing and receiving content from your phone. Then Facebook came  — which managed to straddle both desktop  and mobile devices.

    Now we are entering a phase where we want to repurpose content into other platforms. You may have noticed that many people automatically  re-publish their twitter posts or blog posts  to facebook  or to twitter. (To say nothing of instagram, etc).  I used to find that very annoying — especially because things reposted in Facebook seemed ill-formatted or inappropriate for it. For example, I wouldn’t want to repost all my blogposts onto Facebook (although I feel differently about doing so on Google Plus).

    I don’t heavily use Evernote, but the concept is alluring: it can keep archived versions of certain web pages as well as your own content. Couldn’t I just store all my content streams there?

    I have discovered two services which deal with cross-posting things onto multiple platforms.

    First, there is HootSuite, a tool online marketers use to republish content onto multiple platforms. Which only raises the question: if you are creating your content originally in Hootsuite, how do you archive your Hootsuite content?

    Second, there is IFTTT (short for If This, Then That) which lets you create or use different recipes to convert and publish your content from one platform to another. It basically lets you set up notifications too. Everything seems to be RSS-based, and sometimes the various platforms have special rules and restrictions which make it hard to import/export stuff. Sometimes just browsing through the known recipes can help you figure out a solution; sometimes you need to use a search engine to find what you want. Here for example is a good way to create feeds out of your Google+ posts which then can be scooped up by Facebook.

    Note: this solution isn’t recipe is hosted on a third party site, so it is not likely to last too long. But for now it is the only solution I know of.

    The ultimate goal for a blogger like me is to post at one place where I have full control and high confidence (like my blog) and then use customized RSS recipes to re-post certain things where relevant.

    Don’t count out blogging software. With blogging software you remain in control over data; you own it, and then you simply use intermediary tools to connect things to another. I’m not sure that there’s a clean solution for replicating or backing up comments (though Disqus makes a compelling argument for outsourcing it altogether).

    Of course, you need to take into consideration the specific characteristics of each platform and the nature of the audience. But  I am finding that it is no longer necessary to depend on or live inside these social applications as much. Sure, I stop by Facebook.  It’s certainly nice visiting old friends, but I certainly wouldn’t want to park there and create content ONLY for Facebook.

    The flaw with Facebook (and other community sites) is that they succeed only with good content and mindshare. But when the good content can be found elsewhere (or anywhere!), suddenly there no longer is a compelling reason to park there.  Suddenly that mindshare — which seemed to have so much self-sustaining momentum — seems to  disappear.  The time will soon come when more people will be  reposting onto Facebook than posting. And that will be a good thing.

    Postscript: Making the Blog Cool Again

    A few years ago Virginia Heffernan remarked that with Facebook and Twitter, suddenly it was no longer cool to be blogging anymore. At the time I thought she was mistaken, but over time I  had to admit that my blogging output was significantly less after Facebook came along. I was spending more time on longer articles, less time on casual blogging and linkdumps.

    Intermediaries like IFTTT make it possible to have content originate in WordPress. But that does not solve the problem at all. Here are the issues that initially jump out:

    1. How can a personal blog or website feature both short content and long content without making the site itself unusable?  (The theme would have to do this,  you’d need better front page management and you’d need to have separate content types probably).
    2. What are the rules for displaying short content on  the various platforms? What images show up? How many characters? Does the link show up, etc?
    3. How do you make it easy for people on one platform to see comments people have made on other platforms?

    About the first question, bloggers have typically made linkdump pages on a daily/weekly basis, but does that solve the problem? One thing fun about FB/G+ is that the posts are really short. There’s really no elegant way to repurpose a linkdump post onto facebook. I need time to think this through…..

     

     

  • Best Happy Birthday Songs: I am Super Psyched!

    You may not be aware that Free Music Archive is running a contest to identify some excellent birthday songs. There’s a real need for restaurants,  moviemakers and radio people to identify a song which can be sung royalty-free at any time.

    Out of the 137 songs, here are my 10 favorites. They are all great.

    Some comments about the genre itself:

    A birthday song should be memorable, easy-to-sing, short, inoffensive and slightly offbeat.  It’s a challenging song format. On the one hand, you want to make it as simple and short as possible; on the other hand, you want to make it memorable too. Just the lyrics are a challenge. The songs  needs to have direct rhymes; that means you have a lot of monosyllabic words ending with “ay” (yuck!). Ironically,  the bolder the musical ideas in a birthday song, the less functional the song actually becomes.

    Out of all the songs,  the Danimals’ Super Psyched for your Birthday and Older than Dirt are the most memorable.  Every time I come to the moment where the Danimals scream, I laugh.

    Older than Dirt and Chris Trapper’s “Birthday Song” have the best lyrics, although to be fair, many of the songs don’t even try to be clever or poetic. As a  compromise, the Rodger Rainono “Happy Happy Happy  Birthday” just uses a  refrain where you can add extra lyrics ad infinitum (and some of the lyrics in the recording they use in this recording are pretty damn clever). Who would have ever thought that a birthday song would inspire such humorous and poetic meditations on aging!!

    For brevity, awards go to Monk Turner’s “It’s Your Birthday”, Jazzy J’s “One Year Older” and Caston  Deluca’s “Happy Birthday.”   Deluca’s song is minimalist and charming. Ironically, she is an avante-garde music composer of hazy music landscapes. ( I have already written a profile and interview about songwriter  Monk Turner).

    For singability (i.e., singable by people with limited voices), Rodger Rainono’s “Happy happy happy birthday” and “Older than Dirt” are great.

    For musical ideas, I thought Hendrik Left Engelmann-Löffler’s song had nice interweaving melodies, and Chris Trapper’s song had lots of nice touches (a tuba!). Both songs are too out there to win though.

    The songs I want to win: Superpsyched for your birthday, Older than Dirt, and Chris Trapper’s Birthday.

    Here are the songs that I predict will win: “Happy  Happy happy birthday!” Superpsyched for your birthday and one of the longer songs (either  “Older than Dirt”  or Chris Trapper’s Birthday).

    The grand prize should go either to Superpsyched or “Happy happy happy birthday” because either song does exactly what a birthday song should do.  Interestingly, both songs have multiple verses (which is NOT something you would expect for a birthday song), but the chorus for both songs are easy to remember.

    Finally, I should mention something interesting about the Danimals. Apparently they write and sing a LOT of different birthday songs. I think they write custom songs for people on special occasions. They have 2 versions of the same song: a clean version (“Super-psyched”) and a not-so-clean version (“F*****ing psyched”).

    Believe it or not, I have boycotted the “Happy Birthday” song for several years now, so I am eager to get some new stuff to sing….. I am super-psyched!

  • Chron.com’s lack of coverage of hunger strikers is truly shocking

    Progressives in Texas may already know about how Houston climate change activists are protesting the XL Keystone Pipeline with a hunger strike. But do most Houstonians know?

    A hunger strike is a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion by staging a public act of self-denial. The thinking goes, if the activist demonstrates that his willpower is stronger than his  oppressors, that has enormous persuasive value.  These things can be very annoying for public officials who for one reason or another find themselves on the opposite side of the policy question.

    The Houston hunger strikers are protesting their wrongful arrest at a Valero refinery. As of this date, they have been striking for 18 days.

    That is not a trivial amount of time, and the issues behind this strike are not trivial either. Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey broke the law by locking themselves to Valero tanker trucks in November. Valero is likely to benefit from the XL pipeline, and local environmentalists accuse Valero and other companies of poisoning the area around the refinery. The protest website states,

    Valero Energy Corp’s refinery emits life threatening poisons and pollutants that directly impact Manchester residents. Valero fills the air, water, and land in and around the community with toxic chemicals linked to terrible rates of cancers, asthma, and lung and skin ailments, with the full knowledge that the impacts of its pollutants will disproportionately affect the people of Manchester. With a nearly 90% Latino population, this is an obvious example of environmental racism.

    Manchester is completely surrounded by industry. To the north and east is the Valero refinery with the Lyondell-Bassal refinery to the southeast, Texas Petro-Chemicals plant to the south, a Rhodia chemical plant and a trash shredding facility to the west, a wastewater treatment facility to the east, a Goodyear Tire plant to the southeast, along with the Interstate 610 overpass bisecting the community and an industrial rail yard forming the community’s southern perimeter.

    Valero refinery entrance in Houston

    I once  visited this area for a tour organized by the Sierra Club.  It’s about 30 minutes away from where I live. It is a heinous place to be; no person would want to live anywhere close to this hell hole. Yet the place is inhabited by a lot of lower-income people and families. There is a school a few miles away that because of its proximity was once labeled the most dangerous school in America.

    Even if fewer people lived there, the place would be a nasty eye sore and a potential hazard for Houstonians. Even if we didn’t have to worry about climate change, the place would still be a bad source of carcinogens and a possible source of dangerous accidents.

    The two people who were arrested were seasoned activists. Bob Lindsey had a father and cousin whose deaths can be traced to toxic chemicals released into the Gulf; his sister developed cancer which can also be tied to the petrochemical industry. Diane Wilson, a 4th generation shrimper in the Gulf Coast, has continuously petitioned the Courts and lawmakers to prevent chemical companies from polluting the  bays where her family and friends went fishing. Diane has used hunger strikes before, and both are serious committed people.

    I suppose I could talk about the reasons why the Keystone pipeline are to be opposed, but they have been adequately covered in many places.  Honest people could disagree both about their tactics and the policy they are protesting. Why then has the Houston Chronicle provided so little coverage of the hunger strikes? Googling a bit, I see that almost 3 weeks ago the  FuelFix energy reporter wrote a “he said, she said” article about their arrest. Not a bad article considering, but the Chronicle has never followed up on it. And certainly the subject bears revisiting — 18 days is a long time to wait before writing the follow up on a hunger strike article. Do these nonviolent activists have to go on a killing spree to awaken any media interest?

    Shouldn’t a city newspaper report on such events? Or should it instead provide reports about the zoo’s cheetahs, a winning football team, or Christmas decorating tips? I can’t explain the Chronicle’s avoidance of this current event. Is it just lack of resources? Or does the Chronicle have a policy against covering hunger strikes? Googling a bit, I see that a week ago the  Chronicle published a news service report about Iranian hunger strikers and has even figured out a way to “monetize” site visitors  looking for news about hunger strikes.   hunger-strike-search-results

    I have a unique perspective on the issue because in fact some of my college  students in Albania participated in hunger strikes against their government.  A few days before it happened,  the US embassy had already brought me to the capitol city of Tirana, but when I heard about what the students had done,  I predicted (correctly as it turned out), that it would  cause all the schools in the country to shut down. True, Albania is a much smaller media market country, and in this case there were 60 students protesting, but the issues are no less important in Houston. The fate of the planet is at stake.

    In Albania, the hunger strikers precipitated a series of unfortunate events. The Berisha government declared the hunger strikes illegal because the students hadn’t received the proper license (apparently it is illegal to have any strike without obtaining the proper license). That caused the police to sneak into the university building to arrest the students, causing a fierce gun battle which cost lives.  It was a tragedy for all, and that action triggered lots of violence and civic unrest (which eventually caused Peace Corps to send us home).

    When these events happened in Albania, emotions were strong on all sides. But it would have been unthinkable NOT to cover the hunger strikes. Even the state-run Albanian  TV covered the hunger strikes.  To contrast, there is practically no coverage in any mainstream outlets of the Pipeline hunger strikers  (except Channel 39) and skimpy coverage even by progressive media.

    I’d almost prefer to think that there was some conspiracy not to cover this event in the mainstream media. Instead,  it’s more likely that mainstream media is too busy with other things (some important, some not-so-important). I really don’t have a problem with general news site providing news about entertainment, sports and technology. These things are certainly important in their own way.  But if the bigger news sites focus too much on these things, the burden of reporting these things  falls on unpaid bloggers and Facebook groups.

    Bloggers can certainly do a good job of reporting (see here ) , and Facebook groups like this and this can provide you with interesting news (and that not just  about  consciousness-raising/media manipulation events  like hunger strikes).  Both bloggers and Facebook groups provide incomplete versions of what’s happening. But does that mean mainstream news is better? In many ways, these mainstream news sources are much much worse because they provide the illusion that they are covering all the news that ought to be covered.

    The sad fact is: if I want to find out what’s going on in Houston, reading my city paper is probably the least helpful thing to do. That’s very sad.

    P. S. Both individuals are my heroes.

    Update #1. The hunger strike has now lasted 29 days. The Houston Chronicle still not deigned to provide any coverage of it.  As I write this, the top story on the web edition of chron.com is (I kid you not!) Best Lines of Ron Paul’s Career.

  • Stumbling Upon a Book Idea

    Over the last month or so, I’ve been obsessed with the subject of building and organizing a digital music collection. So much so that I have decided to write an ebook about the subject.

    I’m writing as a dedicated amateur (not an expert), and the treatment will be somewhat technical, somewhat journalistic, somewhat superficial.

    I write a lot of “serious” stuff and often it takes forever to  get them into finished products. Also, I write my serious stuff  under pseudonyms, so it would be nice (finally) to write something under my own name for a change.  Although I plan to make this ebook useful and interesting and personal, I also will make it short – something I can finish in 6 months, and then update over time.

    I may or may not blog about some of the subjects for this ebook.  But I want to mention an outlining/note-taking tool which I’ll be using for this book project. Over time I have used Personal Brain mind-mapping tool to store my research and organize my thoughts.

    The web dump is here: http://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/9E6A5930-6FFC-DBCD-DF75-35B2D4DCCB77;jsessionid=342C824536322A57D5F17127FCA1B14E#-1

    (I am not linking to it because I don’t want search engines to know about it, plus I may eventually mark it as private).

    The desktop interface is a little better.  You can open your brain up in an expanded view (See this screenshot).

    Personal Brain is a costly tool ($200-250, although there’s a free version), and I would not use it for certain kinds of projects, but it does two things extraordinarily well:

    1. It lets you store disparate kinds of information in the note section.
    2. It lets you display and organize your ideas in a very visual manner.

    There is another important and easily overlooked advantage.  I often work with projects over a long period. Sometimes I start with a lot of enthusiasm and start writing and researching. Then – for various reasons –  I have to put the project on the back burner. Later when I try to pick up the same project, I discover that I cannot get into it again.  Either I  misplace my notes or cannot read them. Also I cannot remember the logical connections I once made. When I keep my thoughts and notes in Personal Brain, I am also retaining the logical relationships I am making as well.  Now it becomes much easier to resurrect my notes when I return to the project later.

    Interestingly, although I have used Personal Brain for mind-mapping big projects, often the finished product bears no resemblance to the brain I made for it. That is not the point. The primary purpose of personal brain is not to provide a skeleton for the actual book or essay you will write. Rather it is  to organize and store  thoughts for easy reference before the writing actually begins. The organization in Personal Brain may roughly correspond to your writing outline (especially at high level), but that would merely be a coincidence;  the writing process is much too fluid to be tied down to a preset organization structure.

    Thebrain  lets you sync your local brain with a webhosting site.  I paid for the web brain component  as part of my license. The cost is not small, and my subscription lasts only for a year (after which I will have to renew). I don’t really need public or web access – that is just a nice extra feature. A local brain is good enough.

    Personal Brain has a lot of advanced features which I have not investigated.  I would love to reorganize thoughts and add lateral relationships and jumps (which I know is possible, but I keep forgetting how to do it). 

    Personal Brain seems to be the ideal tool for a book project of this nature. (The superficial and middlebrow Malcolm-Gladwell  kinds of books).  Actually I think historians and literary critics  might find it useful as well.  I haven’t actually started, but I have 3 other projects which I’d like to transfer onto a Personal brain.  This tool not only stores information; it provides   a glimpse of where your ideas are bringing you. When you write things, you may not even know that until after finishing the first draft.