Meta trends - what have we learned?

Posted by jaslar
Dec 24, 2013 at 09:45 PM

First, happy holidays to all. And thank you for making one of the most interesting communities on the web.

As I’ve (mostly) lurked on this site, I have observed several themes.

1. Information gathering. Many of you are roaming and reaping. Let’s call that “research.” You find fragments (text, image, other) of interest or relevance, and you want to mark and remember those things.
2. The arrangement of ideas. This is the interim stage of consideration, engagement and interaction. You toss snippets into buckets, then link and compare and test those snippets. I suppose it’s really about pattern recognition.
3. The generation of new ideas. Ultimately, the intent of this activity is to create something new: to glean new meaning,
4. The publication of one’s work. Here, the idea is to offer it back to the world.

I’ve been poking around the site the past few days, dipping into previous discussion, and do see some trends.

First, there does seem to be a push toward multi-platform tools. This is balanced with some healthy skepticism about life in the cloud (with services that may wink out, not to mention being mined by entities unknown).

Second, the interoperability of data is key. Platforms change, software changes, but many of the folks here assert the need to preserve previous work. (I myself have moved from CP/M to DOS to Windows to the Mac to Linux.)

I have some other ideas and observations, but I’m curious to hear from you. All of you are constantly on the alert for new tools. (That would be CRIMPing!) But what are you seeing about the evolution of those tools—and the trends in information management?