[IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
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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.

Me too.

> | 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.

Better than, actually.  The possibility of having a "sort by, then by,
then by..." functionality has been tossed around, which allows one to
create arbitrary hierarchy based on shared tags.  That's much more
powerful than directories.

> | 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.

I think the larger problem is just the obfuscation of the data
(filenames, etc.).  This is something that we all hope very much to
eliminate in the next iteration of the Journal.

> | 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?

No, it shouldn't. But we're quite limited in terms of time and
resources, and we haven't even gotten close to a satisfactory Journal
yet.  We should focus our efforts entirely on that solution until its
solid, and only then consider adding alternatives.  If others want to
create a "File" activity, that would also be welcome.

- Eben


> 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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