Ryan's Journal

Data capture is one of the primary responsibilities of a computing device (processing and regurgitation are the other two). Forget where the action takes place, whether it's over a network or on a grid or in a cluster or anywhere else; the introduction of a computer into an analog, real-world process should capture and somehow make useful data for human consumption. Everything in between is really only of concern to those fools who work with computers, those like me. You just have to trust us, I guess.

For personal computers, we've abstracted interactions away to the keyboard and the mouse, or variations on them. There are special buttons for modifying what a keyboard input actually does to get better reuse out of twenty-six letters, ten numerals, and various punctuation buttons, and then there's a way to move around in two-dimensional space on a screen. Hopefully useful things show up on the screen when you use them in combination correctly.

For cell phones, there's a dialing pad and some rudimentary scrolling and selecting buttons, out of which you should get a friend's voice. For PDA's, there's a stylus for drawing and selecting, which regurgitates your forgotten short-term memory. For the all-seeing, all-dancing iPod, there's a wheel, out of which you get stolen music.

These things appear to function, when they function. If there's a revolution coming down the pipe, it's going to be a major revolution, and I'm not going to try to be a prophet. I have no idea what that would look like.

What I know is that getting information into the computer is more tiresome and poor than it is good. Especially regarding information you intend to share with some subset of the world. My points of interest RDF editor is good (not great, but cover your ears, horn blowing here) because it captures data about where you click on a map to generate a location-related record. Of course, you can add things by typing addresses or coordinates, or maybe copying and pasting them, for precision, but the click-create is so much more satisfying as an editing interface. Once you've given some thing a location, you can add descriptive text to it - though if you added via the typing interface, that text is already there. And then you can share the output with the world.

Maybe one of the hopes and results of shared, meaningful data is that we don't have to constantly re-input it in potentially (disastrously) lossy ways. Maybe I could use something like Timeline to create and edit a stream of chronological data, with some serious debasement of David's excellent code. But then maybe not every type of data can be captured at a point where human thought and interruption won't corrupt it (e.g., data entry slaves inputting meaningless numbers). Perhaps it's hoping too much for a 'semantic' context for editing particular kinds of data, editing and composing that fits the type without resorting to typing English into little boxes.

And then I look at the textarea on my screen into which I type this disorganized thought, and I doubt there will be a new way to compose a post like this that works better than pecking on letters and writing English into a little gray box on my screen.

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