i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Here’s a great example of a multimedia Personal Information Management system. Gregg Gillis, the artist behind the musical mash-up sensation Girl Talk, discusses on NPR how he organizes the music he samples in his work. Here is the most interesting quote about his system:

Since 1993, artist Nina Katchadourian has been sifting through library collections and remixing their holdings in a delightfully unconventional way. I was going through her ongoing Sorted Books project that constructs irreverent, humorous and witty sentences by arranging a stack of books so that their titles can be read from top to bottom or left to right.

Do you know read-it-later applications? If you don’t, you have to try it. With it, “One reading list, everywhere you are” (from Read it Later). Read It Later and Instapaper are the most used applications. They

There are many reasons to use them.

 In Search Of India's Red-Tape Factory  (It's worth listening to the audio of this story for the ambient sound alone. )

Today when Bob was talking about PIM and the game of catch metaphor, I was reminded of FutureMe.org.  You can write yourself an e-mail on the site, and it will be delivered to 'future you' at some future date. You can choose a year up until 2060. I wonder if it is less likely that I'll be alive in 2060 or that FurtureMe.org will still exist. Maybe we won't even have e-mail anymore. 

Marc Hedlund, co-founder of Wesabe, recently wrote a blog post offering insight into why Wesabe failed and its competitor, Mint, succeeded. The two web applications, which launched within a year of each other, both aimed to help users manage their personal finances. While Wesabe enabled users to tag stores and transactions and took a more community-oriented approach, Mint automatically categorizes information as it is imported from various financial institutions.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-health-update.html

Taking us back to the old ways of gathering information, web search companies are now tapping the power of immediate social circles instead of social networks to suggest answers to any question we might have. With virtually endless information available to us on the internet, companies have been trying to hone in on how best to present us with information that interests us, and how to make money from it.

NPR recently featured a story on religiously-specific search engines. These search engines filter all results based on specific religious beliefs. There are currently separate search engines for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Besides the controversy over it being considered censorship, these search engines raise questions on how the returned results are being selected; particularly who is doing the filtering and what criteria is being used.