self sorting, self organising blog

I have been missing my blog. I am developing a hierarchy of recording stuff. I keep a number of notebooks. I say, a number, because I would have to count them.

Firstly - I carry around a small pocket notebook to record stuff.

I keep a jotter for work and one for home, that I use for the run of the mill notetaking, for example minutes of meetings, and working notes. I glue a business card to the front of each, and write the dates covered on the cover with a marker pen.

I keep a notebook for creative ideas for woodwork and the garden, it also includes clippings that I find inspiring, and might want to pick up on to some extent.

I keep a notebook of what I have done and planted in the garden. Initially this was organised into helpful categories, and also included a running diary, but I never used the helpful categories, and now I just use the running diary, but this means that I cannot find things without a lot of effort.

Following on from reading A Year with Swollen Appendices, by Brian Eno, I kept a diary for a year.

I also keep various other virtual notes, I have been trying to get familiar with omni-outliner, and I use it for the odd list, but they seem to get compiled, then sit unloved on my desktop.

And finally there is my blog.

I suppose there is a sort of evolution going on here, the stuff that works will keep on getting used, while the stuff that is just that bit too much faff, for the use, is abandoned. I supposed that I could move towards making more of these records electronic, but I quite like the ease of simply recording stuff without a computer. There is usually a queue forming round our computer anyway, so the more that I can do without it, the easier my life is.

A lot of the subsequent usability of a record is in how easy it is to search, which is determined by how organised it is, or how searchable it is. I did toy with the idea of writing an entire novel on file cards, which I would write, and then sort and resort. Obviously this is not an entirely new idea. William Burroughs worked with cut-ups, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, is organised in a rather idiosyncratic way. There is also post-modernism, or even Tristram Shandy if you want to look at experimentation in ordering.

The idea of order is actually dependent on there being a reader.

* The material can be written in any order you like,

* organised in another,

* and finally read in yet another.

[another example of input - process - output]

The organisation in the middle serves some purpose, does it facilitate or inspire the reader. A phone directory in a purely random order would be a very different beast from one in alphabetical order. Similarly although a phone directory is in alphabetical order, that is not how you read it. You use the order, so that you can search it, you read it in an interest defined order. If technology can do the sorting on the fly, for you, then the actual order of material is irrelevant.

For example I often spend an evening browsing across the internet, following up on interests. Checking out wikipedia, then maybe a forum or two, check blogs via technorati, put a book on my wishlist at Amazon. The order is responsive to what interests me, I hyperlink, or jump up to my to bookmark bar, to do a fresh search.

Returning to the three categories above, the web is written in a certain order, it is organised in another, but I choose to read it in yet another.

This works because of the power of hyperlinks and searching.

I have a number of problems with novels, I don’t really think that the novel is a valid art form anymore. It has lost its purpose and role. Like when contemporary music hits a stale patch, everything seems like a pastiche of something else.

Part of my problem with the novel, is that the author imposes their order on the reader. There might only be one strand that interests you, only one character you are curious about, but these are twined into the whole, and you cannot opt out of the rest. There are many fine things about narrative, it keeps you reading. But I am not sure that the lasting value of writing lies in how strong the narrative is.

My other problem with novels, is that they impose a single viewpoint. I am increasingly coming to the view, that I always believe two contradictory things, and constantly have to decide between them. Generally an author will have decided, how do we view this person, what happened next, is this action a mistake. A novel creates a pattern and narrative. That is why they are so appealing. However novels do not really tell you anything about the present tense, but we live in the present tense, we are constantly in a decision making mode.

Do I make another cup of tea, I would like another cup, or do I keep typing, for fear of losing the thread of what I am writing. Factor in that I drink far too much tea, and decide to carry on typing. The debate is parked for a short while, but will resurface when I run dry of ideas along this thread, and the balance of the argument tips, and I decide that there is no longer a thread to lose, I’ll start drinking less tea tomorrow, and I will make myself another cup of tea.

We would all love to be that person in a novel, Gully Foyle in The Stars my Destination, Matt Damon striding up the hill with a shot gun to kill the assassin that is chasing him. These are people devoid of ambiguity, pure of purpose. But we live with a constant critic, worrying about the opportunity cost of what we have done, what if we had done something else, when does the balance of the argument tilt, when do we give up on this bad investment, when do we give up on a bad marriage, when do we decide to change career.

Having successfully gone off on a tangent for three paragraphs, I must return to my thoughts on ordering.

I do find this blog useful as a way of capturing material. I have consciously made it a diary of my ideas, rather than something of any physicality, it is not a diary of what I have done, but of what I have been thinking about. That then is the input.

However a blog has a very specific order, and like the American date format, a rather illogical one at that. It starts with the most recent, entry, but that is ordered from oldest to newest, because that is the way that we write. We simply start at the top of the page. The assumption is that people are most interested in what you wrote most recently, so that is where they start, they can then drill down.

I have been thinking about a self-sorting or self-organising blog. Clearly as my blog is about ideas, I would like to see it organised, so that all the stuff on the same topic sits together. That way I can see what I have already written on something. Maybe I will contradict what I have already written. Maybe I will now have enough material to work up into an article. Maybe I am looking for some creative ideas for an article. Over the past few weeks I have developed three product ideas, and about half a dozen ideas for 2000AD comic strips. At a certain point I will want to pursue these.

I have been doing some searching on the web for software that would give you a self sorting and organising blog. I don’t think it exists, because the order that a blog appears in, is a crucial aspect of it actually being a blog. In a sense I am not really writing a blog. The date order of entries is less relevant than the topics covered. So maybe I am looking for something else altogether. A blog peppered with hyperlinks gets close to what I am thinking of, but I think the crucial thing is that the reader can search, manipulate and order the material themselves. I do not want to impose my order onto the reader.

I would love to find a way of doing this as a blog. However in the meantime, I may well experiment with Omni-Outliner, and if it does not allow web publishing, try and pitch this idea to them. Like a lot of my ideas, it falls short of being something that you could patent and make money from, but some sort of recognition would be welcome.

Getting down to the detail, Omni Outliner basically produces an outline, but allows you to sort it, include check boxes etc. I could just enter stuff, with appropriate details in columns, put a timestamp against each row, and then type away. Obvious problems, what if an entry covers more than one topic. How does it get sorted. Does the entry appear more than once, that is once per topic, or only once. Also what about a piece like this, that is finely crafted, and covers a variety of different sub-topics but is actually best read as a single entry. Is this blog entry a single entry, read from top to bottom, or do I split it up and lose the development of a single argument.

These are not new problems. They are probably just an artefact of how we look at things. When you browse the internet, or Amazon, or iTunes, you do not worry about passing the same point twice. In fact the more often you pass a point, the more it will pique your interest. That is part of intelligence. The recognition of patterns, gosh that is the third time that someone I respect has mentioned this author that I have never heard of, maybe I should check them out.

Just to park the thought, there are tags, and digg, etc, none of which I really understand.

Are we creating something like a phone directory, which you are not expected to read from cover to cover, but use all the time, or a novel, where you have to complete it.

Is it software, or dead tree?

Maybe, what we are looking for is a constantly evolving and updated, repository of ideas, images, and material, that people think is worth recording, easy sorted, organised, and searched, which allows you to flag some as private, some as friends only, some for public consumption. A compendium of your blog, your flickr, your myspace. A freeform version of what is unique and important about you. The problem with most of these things, is that they are too constrained, you start your diary on 1 January, but give up before February, because you did not fill in every box, or you did not have enough space, or you decided you did not want to record the day you spent in bed hungover, or...

A free form, easily searched and organised, braindump of what it is to be you. Now that is something that would catch your soul.

As a coda, reading through this, I have been writing about three different things. As per my point in an earlier blog, what is the difference between a leaflet, and and exhibition? We impose a way of looking at things, because that is what we expect. We expect a leaflet to conform to a certain format, and a exhibition to conform to another. Both convey information in a style to which we are accustomed.

There is a narrative book, some less narrative than others, such as Tristram Shandy, but clearly the order is consciously chosen and important, you would not think to reorder a confusing book into chronological order to improve it, or the chapters into popularity order so you did not miss the best bits.

There is a reference title, such as the Yellow Pages, telephone directory, dictionary, and even some reference books such as you DIY manual. These are tools that you use to find out more.

Then there is software, or amalgamations of software, that allow for a reader defined pathway through material. Technology has enhanced the ability for us to follow pathways, that is part of the success of Amazon and iTunes, they tempt and distract you with things that they think you might be interested in.

I suppose what I am saying, is that I would like to create something more like the last category, than the first.