[IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

Benjamin M. Schwartz bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu
Fri Aug 15 10:48:22 EDT 2008


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forster at ozonline.com.au wrote:
| I remain unconvinced that a journal, even with enhanced tagging and
searching, is the best solution.

I am pretty well convinced.

| While making things easier for novice users, (the "low entry"), it takes
away the "high ceiling" that a hierarchical structure can give the
non-novice user.

How so?  Both tags and hierarchies provide a combinatorial explosion of
labels for objects.  In fact, unless you have directories like
/foo/bar/baz AND /bar/baz/foo, tags are just as good as directories for
uniquely identifying objects.

| I have found the concealment of the underlying directory structure from
the user quite frustrating when working with email attachments.

It would be good to hear your specific frustration in this use case.

| The journal rapidly fills with rubbish, I could not turn off the autosave.

As you may have noted, the new Journal designs
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Journal) provide a "Star" column to
identify important entries.  A single click then shows only the starred
entries.  New objects, such as e-mail attachments, will not generally be
starred on creation.

| The journal is OK but should it be the only tool available to the user?
Isn't the best file system the one which most empowers the user?

How does the Journal fail to empower the user?  With tagging and
versioning, the Journal design empowers the user to organize their
objects, find their objects by organization scheme or by content, and
never lose something because they forgot to save it.  That seems like
plenty of power to me.

- --Ben
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