Friday 2 November 2007

LifeStreams -> WorkStreams

I love the idea of life streams - its great to be able to easily leave a trail behind you of cool stuff you have done/found.
I have been thinking lately about WorkStreams....
I used to be a lab scientist - and one of the things I used to hate the most about that job was having to maintain a Lab Notebook - it was a real drag having to take time out of my day to write (using a pen!!!) about what I had done. This is not to say that it wasn't neccessary, for patent and freedom to operate purposes it was essential, and it was really useful to have a record to look back on when I wanted to check something.
Nowerdays I am a software developer, and so the need to do this has subsided, I have all my code checked into Subversion , and that is all I need. However I really miss having that record of stuff that I have done/thought about etc.
For tagging cool web resources we have a tagging service, for recording my thoughts and ideas I have a personal twitter like service, and for recording the miscellaneous stuff that cant be put in our tagging service I have OneNote. However I really wish there was an aggregated stream of all this digital information that I could scan like my old lab notebook. A work stream could realise this, and not only that, if it was integrated into our Enterprise 2. suite, it would be effort free to create, but gives me that extra bit of return on taking the effort of tagging, and posting all this stuff in the first place, win-win.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is amazing how there are so many of these Web 2.0 apps popping up with subtle and overlapping variations. The architecture is often the same with new twists on functionality. Jaiku and iStalkr for example. Where does it end??

Jason Marshall said...

I aggre, and the problem is, chosing which service to use. I used to use Jaiku but never really saw any benefit, then moved to Twitter and have had some great interactions through it.
I think your point re. the architecture is pertinent - essentially all these things are doing the same thing but with a different interface.
What we need is application interoperability - where if I prefer the interface of Jaiku but have friends on Twitter I should still be able to use Jaiku to interact with people on twitter. I think Googles Open Social is a good first step, but i remain skeptical that this will bring true interoperability in the near term, rather a proliferation of new, slightly polymorphic versions of existing apps. I hope to prooved wrong.

Anonymous said...

I'm starting to work on how we capture the rich information our employees generate every day as a by-product of them doing their job - tagging's probably a big cultural leap for them so, as ever, the business/human change is the biggest challenge. I recall a google story I once read describing how their engineers are required to complete a couple of lines every day on what they've been doing and their internal systems make sense of it all and route it to the people who need to know. Wonderful.