The review of this map of cognition was triggered by my attempt to understand a key point in David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous (my acronym E=M)
Step 1 - above - depicts my review of the Picasa image collection using a drawing by Barcelona sketch artist Joan Mas from her sketch book on GTD which I found last year courtesy of Karen Bennett.Step2 -From the miscellaneous(but remixable/reconstructable) Thoughts Illustrated image collection in Picasa, I selected the one below also drawn by Joan Mas, which I then linked backThoughts Illustrated: GTD -Because getting organized should be fun.
Now there must be a way to connect the "pipes" of Picasa and Blogger to enable me to grok my TI archives visually - and engage with David in conversation about his filtering concept (p 103 Everything is Miscellaneous - E=M) using images to express my thoughts and to enable this while I am "IN" blogger! ( As of May 3, 2008 this function is not yet enabled and may take a google API hacker to create it)It would show the power of E= M more effectively if I could make the link to p 103 while I was posting this - and even more effective a "reconstruction" of my TI archive if I could link to this post on CPA automatically.Thoughts Illustrated: The Creative Tension of CPA
I wonder if this RSS-able collection of links could be dragged and dropped onto a Grazr Widget and serve as a conversation "platform" for asking David - what do you mean by that statement? Is my excursion through my own archival material filtering on the way out- or as I am led to conclude - is it like this......?
Step 1 - Panning - Scan the image collection from TI posts
Step 2 - Zooming- Find the Joan Pas image I posted on GTD and Conversation
Step 3 - Linking - Reconstructing from the TI reverse chronological archive ( blogsearch)
Step 4 - Posting - Creating this new blog post - starting the conversation
Step 5 - Notifying - Sending David a notice of this post
Step 6 - Waiting - Hoping that David will respond and comment (conversation)
If E=M text was digital and searchable, it would begin to make the concept of networking David's book much more useful. because the conversations that can be stimulated and peer produced from E=M readers can add significant value in helping David's central memes survive and find utility in our complex world. (This would also be true if David Allen's GTD was distibuted in ebook form for linkage and mashups)
Finally, to give thanks to the original connection to Joan Mas images, the original link was from Karen Bennett Picture It Solved - a visual approach to thinking
I was pleased to see Karen and her new husband at the Vizthink conference in January.
Note:Misspelling of Joan Mas in this post has been corrected from "Pas" to "Mas" wherever the misspelling occured in the original post Sorry Joan.
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4 comments:
Dave, thanks for this. Here's what I just blogged about it:
Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated gives an interesting illustration of the “filter on the way out” idea from EiM. He notices that Picasa has been silently aggregating the images in his blog. Now he can go back through it and notice relationships and trends. He gives six steps of working through the pile of images. The six step certainly seem to work for this example, but I’m not sure how generalizable it is since, in my view, the miscellaneous is a pile of raw potential for the emergence of every sort of understanding and meaning, from noticing that you’ve used lots of pictures of Michael Jackson to running statistical and semantic tools that discover deeply hidden relationships.
The idea behind “filter on the way out” is that it’s often (usually?) better to give users tools for sorting through the pile the way that suits them than to only give them a single, pre-baked categorization.
http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2007/09/11/filtering-on-the-way-out/
thanks David - my 6 step process worked!
Responding to : "The idea behind “filter on the way out” is that it’s often (usually?) better to give users tools for sorting through the pile the way that suits them than to only give them a single, pre-baked categorization"
we are working now to build a demo application of ConversationBase that does exactly what you describe in this comment.
would you be interested in viewing it when we have it ready?
In rethinking David's filtering comments, I realized that I "filtered out" (BAD) just one of his four strategic principles he recommends for gleaning meaning from the abundance of the miscellaneous.
Here are the other 3:
Put each leaf on as many branches as possible.
Everything is metadata and everything can be a label.
Give up control.
Taken in a less filtered form, and taken together as a whole, these 4 strategic principles are now more understandable to me(I think)
which leads me to David's admonition (from p 224 E=M) "Thou shalt include and postpone"...
the miscellaneous can only scale by enabling local collections to make sense to other collections"
Include everything in your miscellaneous knowledge collection and your links to everyone else's , but Postpone the urge to jump to categorizing the collection too soon - (filtering on the way in)
this accords with the Wikinomics principles of Openness, Peer Production, Sharing and Global, and with Umair Haque's vision of the role of the Reconstructor in making sense (remixing) of the result of peer production. Which leads me to realize that it's time to loop the commentary here to my next blog entry on Haque's economics of Media 2.0
The hardest part of David's principles to envision and act upon is " give up control"
David, I am the author of these illustrations and the correct name is Joan M. Mas, not Pas :-)
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