Time costs and disconnectedness in PIM systems

Van Kleek, M. G., Bernstein, M., Panovich, K., Vargas, G. G., Karger, D. R., and Schraefel, M. (2009). Note to self: examining personal information keeping in a lightweight note-taking tool. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1477-1480:

"We also observed that users often do not respect the traditional boundaries of PIM — for example, by mashing contact information into calendar appointments and calling it a to-do. This may be yet another instance of users optimizing for rapid capture: the time cost of interacting with multiple traditional PIM applications is even more substantial than that needed for one. But we believe another issue is in play: that they feel the information is a unit, and do not wish to partition it among multiple disconnected applications, where it will be harder to view and retrieve as a unit. This indicates a significant need for a more flexible data model and user model in PIM systems." (p. 1480)

Another related entry on scrapnotes and «technologizing» everything with links for the Haystack Group and associated projects, like the one referred in the study - List.it.

information distillation

Inspired by the image provided by SciTopics (above) provided by Scirius, I wonder if the information is distilled by others, won't the individual be distilling a little further by the act of reading with losses in the process? When doing research we have to distill it ourselves to gain the needed knowledge to advance the research. Distilling is part of the process of creating new knowledge. In the picture above (obviously biased by what I've been doing), in the last rectangular that reads «SciTopics» I read «Literature Review» ;-)

PS [Oct 14, 2009] note to self: see Webtrendmap model on «information curators» (via GSiemens Newsletter) and also Mopsos model back in 2004 on blogs (as information elicitation) for CoPs formation (end of post, link to image model).