Things are moving fast in the world these days, so I’ll step with brisk caution. Nothing fancy in this first post using the Flock web access platform (as they say, ‘browser’ is so inadequate to describe what web users do these days).

I’m using the developer pre-prerelease of Flock. I’d heard about it a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until my phone conversation with Alex Rollin that I decided to go searching for new interesting stuff. In addition to Flock, I stumbled upon ourmedia and CivicSpace. 

I am happy as all get-out that the web infrastructure is starting to come alive to assist people and organizations in acting more as a unit. During the conversation with Alex, I talked about my desires for capabilities. I’m woefully inadequate at organizing myself even without all of the new content spewing forth, so I’ve been on the lookout for decent tools. Outliners came to my attention this past week, and I’ve just started scheduling via Planzo. I’ve also set up a ProtoPage, but all of this stuff is still quite disconnected. Though I’ve got a CS degree, I never made much use of it in the coding field. I’m trying to take care of that with some Ruby on Rails self training, but that takes time. I’m tinkering withthe ProtoPage to get it to do what I want, but I can tell it’s not ever going to satisfy me completely, and I’ll just end up frustrated that it won’t do everything for me.

So, what am I looking for?

Glad you asked. The old school models like YahooGroups and Usenet is topic based. Find the group and post there. It fit well with the desktop folder metaphor, and is heirarchical (left brain linear - see Dan Pink’s  A Whole New Mind.). The blogging solution is very much a tag metaphor, where we’ve got some kind of folksonomy for a particular user, and follow their interests. This seems analogous to the depth vs. breadth metaphor for tree traversal, but it doesn’t quite fit. What I really want is some combination of the two on the content creation side, as well as the content retrieval side.

I would like to have my own mind-map/idea-map like interface that was local to my own machine. It would act as my home application and contain links to all of my other applications and data (calendar, mail, documents, etc.). This would be my starting place, and the container for all my contributions. But it would also server as my launch pad, so that if I found that I wanted to post something to my blog, I’d just SendTo the blog of choice. I could also choose multiple destinations, and they could all refer back to my tree, so that if I updated my stuff, it was current everywhere. I’m starting to think this sounds a bit more like Ted Nelson’s original Xanadu vision.

But in addition to being the launchpad, it would also serve as an RSS reader application. I love del.icio.us (who doesn’t), but still want it to do more. I would like to get a flag when others who have similar interests to my own, and when they have found and tagged content that I might like.

This isn’t all crystal clear for me right now, but I’ve got to wrap up for now. Back with more later.