There is an excellent article on O’Reilly Radar about the use of Web applications in a military environment. Basically, DARPA came up with a combination of a Wiki and Google Maps that would allow soldiers to see where IEDs were being utilized by the enemy, sharing intelligence in real time and allowing patterns to be found and actions to be implemented by the people on the ground.

This really is an outstanding example of the power of information architecture. Traditional intelligence focused on getting information up the chain of command, getting it analyzed, and getting a comprehensive plan back to the troops. However, this situation was too fluid, too fast, too rapidly changing to go through all that rigamarole. So, the oversight and aggregation process was automated.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

First, it seems to highlight a general rule of technology: Once a process can’t move faster or be more flexible than automation, it will be subsumed. We have seen this a million times in a million different ways. Most of us have been a part of this process, either as an automator or being automated.

Second, it highlights how important it is for management and administration to improve as rapidly as the organizations they support. In the past, it has been the job of management to drive their subordinate organizations to improve, and often they did not hold themselves to the same standards. I can recall a time where the person who demanded that we automate everything possible required us to manually fill out and send an Excel spreadsheets that documented our progress.

I think that we are in the throws of new wave of organizational change based on newer, more flexible technologies like Wikis, Open Mapping Tools, and Social Networking. We should be seeing a lot more of stories like this in the MSM over the next year or so as it moves into the more public consciousness. And, in 24 months it will be a part of the common wisdom, and we won’t remember doing thing any differently.

Well, I have to admit it. I am really, really, really impressed with Livescribe. This is the single most important, must-have tool for me in my professional life. I have been an Apple guy since my first Powerbook 520c (in the mid 1990’s) but put off the purchase of a MacBook Pro because of the lack of availability of Livescribe Desktop.

If you haven’t used Livescribe before, let me explain. Imagine a cross between a Moleskine notebook, a digital voice recorder, and Tivo. Based on a specialized pen and paper, it allows you to automatically transfer any notes you take onto your computer, where you can search through them or share them as PDF’s. In addition, the pen can record sound as you are writing, which gives a much more human element to your notes. Best of all, these notes can be shared remotely with other people through the power of the web. You really have to see it to believe it.

Let me go on a bit about why I value Livescribe so much …

Flexibility

Livescribe has the basic flexibility of pen and paper, and that can’t be overrated. Back in the day I was that person who brought his laptop to meetings to type up notes and send them out to everyone. It seemed cool, and nice, and it was good to be able to refer to things later. The problem was, it was deceptively ineffective. I was confusing motion for action. If someone is presenting, I may need to take notes. If they are drawing, I may need to do a quick sketch. If they are talking (especially emotionally) I need to understand.

This just can’t be done typing into any text based tools, and I have tried a lot of them (I used the heck out of VoodooPad and heartily recommend it, but not more than paper). I can’t stop in the middle of a meeting to open a drawing program to try and copy what is on the whiteboard. Even if I could, I couldn’t go back and examine the flow of the meeting, determine what the key points were and what I might have missed or could have done better.

Accessibility

Livescribe has the accessibility of both paper and computer. I use a Moleskine-sized notebook as my “daybook”, to record who I met, what I did, and things I need to do in the future. I also take notes on meetings and do a lot of brainstorming before I start coding. This allows me to really focus on the important things (people, concepts, ideas) and not get wrapped up in time-wasters. This isn’t something unique to Livescribe, I got the same thing with the moleskine or a plain pad of paper.

The dramatic advantage that Livescribe has over paper is that I can go back and search my notes for previous entries or words or phrases that might pertain to whatever I am thinking about today. I do that a lot less with Livescribe than I thought I would, simply because I seem to remember things better if I write them down. However, the times that I have had to do a search it has been absolutely invaluable.

Recording and Sharing

The most impressive feature of the system is the ability to share your notes with others. While some people would use this for class notes and the like, I am long out of college and working in the world. As a Sales Engineer I have to travel a lot and visit clients and prospects in pretty remote locations. I don’t always have my Account Executive with me, but he definitely needs to know what is going on whenever possible.

This is where Livescribe really proves its worth. The ability to share a recording of a meeting (along with detailed notes) is awesome. When I get on a plane I can review a meeting myself, and later send it to my partner who can know just about everything that went on in the room, with enough detail to understand what was verbalized and how.

In Conclusion

Livescribe really gives you the best of both worlds, paper and electronic. It fully lives in both media, but combines the two in a way that is greater than the sum of the parts. Sure, I have some grumbles (the pen is large, I wish there were more paper options, the pen doesn’t have a top and there isn’t a good, small pen case available, it is harder than it should be to search across multiple notebooks, you can’t group pages or use metadata with the electronic text) but overall it is invaluable to me.

You will have to pull Livescribe from my cold, dead fingers!

One of the most highly valued features of information architecture is accuracy. Everyone wants everything to be perfect: every answer should be as factually accurate as possible and available immediately to whomever needs it. This was the promise of the internet as a whole, and of the web specifically (especially the “semantic web“, which I have ranted about before).

The Economist has a great article about digital libraries and the effects of imprecision searching for information. Large voices have talked in great detail about the Long Tail of information on the web. That is, information doesn’t lose its value on the internet as quickly as it does elsewhere because it remains available forever. For example, an article printed in a newspaper could easily be lost in the dustbin of history simply because it can’t be easily indexed and read by the people who want to see it the most. The same information in a blog will be available through Google for the rest of eternity.

However, researchers have found that exactly the opposite is happening with scientific media. The number of links to older materials actually declined as it was moved from paper to the web. In other words, the newest, most popular material was linked to more often, creating a shorter tail than had otherwise existed. You can read the article itself for more details on the nature of the experiment itself.

I think that this study actually shows the value of inaccuracy in search. Humans don’t need less accurate information to do their job today. However, in the long term we need less accurate information in order to take us down paths we might not expect. The very act of turning pages in a book might allow some bit of information to catch the eye of the reader (either consciously or unconsciously) and take them down a path they might not otherwise have traveled. Think ask.com and iTunes cover flow vs. the bubble sort.

IMHO, this highlights the fact that the brain needs a level of accuracy in order to function, but also requires a bit of fuzziness in order to grow and thrive. This is just a part of our biology and our cognition. As Information Architects, we need to understand this in order to build the right systems for people.

I admit it, I am a bit obsessive about organization. From Franklin Covey to Palm to Blackberry to laptop utilities I have used them all at one time or another. I have tried different methodologies, from the Cornell Method to GTD to 7 Habits and even made up my own. Of course, all of this came along simply because I am not an organized person by nature. I always needed an outboard brain to help me with the little things so I could prevent them from becoming big things down the road.

Whenever I used a system, there was always some cognitive dissonance between paper space and electronic space. I think this is because of the fundamental differences in the media. Paper is very simple and easy to use. It is well-established, well-supported and handles both structured and unstructured information very well. Electronic data is just the opposite; it is new, evolving, and limited in what it can represent. It can be difficult to use if you aren’t doing exactly what is expected. However, information stored in electronic media are much easier to search, sort, share, store, and duplicate. This is a great advantage for a lot of things, but not everything.

My desire is wanting the ease of use and flexibility of paper, but the power to search and share like electronic media. I think I may have found this in the Livescribe Pulse. The Pulse is a pen and paper combination that allows you to use paper like you want to, but then have the information synchronized with your computer. The text is searchable (through a proprietary application) and can be exported to the web.

In addition, the Pulse is able to record sound as you write, which can be invaluable during meetings where your hand can’t keep up with the banter. You can then touch the page and play back your recording directly from your notes, to see what people were talking about when you wrote your cryptic note. This makes the export capability all the more interesting, as it essentially makes a movie, with the picture being your pages and the audio being the sounds around you as you took your notes. The entire movie is exportable as well (see some examples here).

While it is in its infancy, this is very, very, very interesting technology. There are several things that I wish it had:

• The ability to group like pages from different notebooks to organize my own folders of information (something like a tag cloud).
• The ability to export movies privately as Flash or QuickTime, to only share them with the people who I want to, not the whole web.

Also, while the paper choices are decent, they are proprietary and certainly don’t compare with some of the better paper systems out there (like Moleskine or Levenger). I would like to be able to get normal 8 1/2 x 11″ paper and put them into a Circa notebook easily. Also, there isn’t any graph paper which is a problem for a math geek like myself.

It is new, and I would give it the benefit of the doubt. If you are in the market for a new planner, I would give it a look. It really starts to blur the lines between different media in a way that really benefits the user instead of the purveyor. More on this next time.

Wow, it has been almost a year since my last post. A lot of reasons for that (probably equal parts laziness and busyness), but I am back and on my soapbox yet again.

I have changed my career path, not radically but significantly enough. Previously, I had been an ETL Architect, consulting at Fortune 500 companies and working with Ab Initio, Oracle, and UNIX. However, about 6 months ago I moved out of my long-time comfort zone and into something new.

I now am a Sales Engineer working in the Data Warehouse Appliance space. I know a lot of people say that they are satisfied with their career or that they enjoy what they do. I feel sorry for these people. I absolutely, positively the best job in the world with one of the best companies in the world.

I LOVE MY JOB!

Being an SE isn’t for everyone, but it certainly is for everyone who likes to deal with complex situations where you rarely have enough information to act decisively and have the urgent need to act decisively. IT is for anyone who likes to deal with people as much as with technology and it is for anyone who has the vision to see the world from both the eyes of a business person, an analyst, a programmer, a DBA, a system administrator. It takes an interesting mix of empathy, vision, and technical excellence that you don’t really need for most cubicle jobs. It is easily as technical as my most difficult consulting engagements, but significantly more fast paced and exciting.

Look for more in the future.