On JOVE, On Thoughts, On YouTube

When someone applies for a free trial at JoVE, they get a request to verify their email.  So, yesterday, I got the following email response to our verification from a character by the name of Terry:

Terry: GO FUCK YOURSELF

Nice…  Did I screw up again?  A wrong email sent out?  And this guy is from a reputable institution…  So the following conversation ensued:

Observations on Thought Part II

After a good night sleep…  in two parts (3 to 11 + 12 to 4…holy crap, I am a ridiculous waste), need to formalize what it is I am looking for in a “blog”.  First off, there is one idea we need to shed – not everybody is interested in everything about you.  Or me, in this case.  For instance, chatted with Cyn this morning and her voice betrayed a bit of a disappointment “Oh, this is work related…” until she scrolled down and saw the word “relationships” and I felt a proverbial "Aha!”.

Anyway, point being that people are not interested in everything I do.  Moreover, even I am not interested in everything I do.   A blog is a way for me to verbalize my thoughts, organize my life.  And I will rarely (never so far) go reading randomly from my past posts…  if someone else ever does so, it will probably to dig up dirt for when I am running for president. Which right now is not very likely.  Too verbose.  BTW, I shave my head yesterday.  It felt amazing.

Moving right along.  So what I need is something that is not temporally organized.  Let’s start simple: I need a root, the root needs to grow into a tree, and people interested in various aspects of what I write should be able to track branch growth changes/additions/improvements.

To take this a step further, I would argue that this is not unique to people following individuals.  This should also extend to people tracking ANY information including news tracking of news stories.  Moreover, depending on value of each individual branch, it may be possible to do micropayments.

I know what you are thinking.  But this is what tags and categories are for!  And you are right – there is some measure of scoping, but there is no focus. There should always be an article with conclusions. And, it may be possible to do what I am describing now through the existing systems, but it takes too much work.  Too much work means it doesn’t get done.  (Aside – I wonder how difficult it would be to quantify the energy threshold for when tasks become easy enough to be adopted by the market).

So some conclusions (C: = conclusion):

• C: my blog is an online notebook that needs to be easy to work with.
• C: it should be possible to discern importance of information within a particular context (information unit?) 
• Aside: Perhaps informational units should be identified as content is written?
• C: blogs should enable writing to accumulate information into a structure that is not temporally dependent.

While writing this, I had another thought – what if I am completely wrong about my approach to this?  what if, in fact, what I am describing is a sort of “refactoring” of material that can most effectively now be supported through workflows combined with the wordpress pages feature?  For example, there are tons of wiki systems and blogs that try to have a plethora of features, but text is still easiest to work with most of the time, so Wikipedia is primarily text-based with regular rehashing (this is an assumption – I don’t know this for a fact) of content to be better organized.

Conclusion: I need to outline conceptual demands for a system and then, even thought it will be annoying, support these systems through workflows rather than through designing as system.  Then a system can be popped into place to support what I need to have done.

While writing this, also some thoughts:

• Formatting needs to be more flexible to allow presentation to bring additional information.  If you noticed, I was bolding out important concepts to allow skimming of this material.  It would be great if I could also use indentation more aggressively as well as coloring of text.
• Gray out non-bold text
• Bullet point symbols should specify what sort of content bullet it is: concept, aside, etc.

Basically, I need richer metadata to allow for less re-organization.

Now, major workflow question – how do I take my thoughts here and make sure that there is сухой остаток (Russian: a dry remainder).  Something actionable.

Observations on Thought

First off, we [people] are generally not interested in the process. Sure, there are scenarios when people do for the sake of doing (ends=means: music, snowboarding, leisure reading, watching movies, etc.), but I am talking about things like studying, working, doing things with an end-goal in mind.

The present blogging structure is not fit for this workflow – it is more of a pleasure-oriented medium so far.

So, two main points:

1. Since this blog is intended to be my notebook, I need to change it.  Specifically, I need a product that would:
1. Allow my readers (assuming someone other than me cares about content here), to get a present state and historical updates.
2. Ability to interact with content on a constant basis.
2. I am interested in answers to questions, which defines how I do research. For example, question that I have are:
1. What is the most efficient way to exercise and why?
2. How do I learn how to speed-read?
3. Is what I am eating adequate?

Both have straighforward ways of being addressed, but need to sleep now.  Will post more later.