38. A "lifestream" organizes information not as a file cabinet does but roughly as a mind does.

39. A lifestream is a sequence of all kinds of documents - all the electronic documents, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, email messages and every other digital information chunk in your life - arranged from oldest to youngest, constantly growing as new documents arrive, easy to browse and search, with a past, present and future, appearing on your screen as a receding parade of index cards. Documents have no names and there are no directories; you retrieve elements by content: "Fifth Avenue" yields a sub-stream of every document that mentions Fifth Avenue.

40. A stream flows because time flows, and the stream is a concrete representation of time. The "now" line divides past from future. If you have a meeting at 10AM tomorow, you put a reminder document in the future of your stream, at 10AM tomorrow. It flows steadily towards now. When now equals 10AM tomorrow, the reminder leaps over the now line and flows into the past. When you look at the future of your stream you see your plans and appointments, flowing steadily out of the future into the present, then the past.

41. You manage a lifestream using two basic controls, put and focus, which correspond roughly to acquiring a new memory and remembering an old one.

42. To send email, you put a document on someone else's stream. To add a note to your calendar, you put a document in the future of your own stream. To continue work on an old document, put a copy at the head of your stream. Sending email, updating the calendar, opening a document are three instances of the same operation (put a document on a stream). [David Gelernter]

Some interesting ideas. Could Weblogs be developed into a "lifestream" interface? Would we benefit from putting "reminder documents" in the future of our streams?

3:43:24 AM    

Yeah, I said it. Could get me run over on Route 17, but I said it anyway. What's really amazing is how my tech partner Karen Claxton's growing interest in blogs has rekindled my flame. (That and finishing the silly MA paper.) She's the one pushing the Daily Blog'etin and helping spread the blog-spel according to Manila. (Though our digital sermon on the mount, announcing the blog'etin at today's faculty meeting, was postponed so that we could all argue about prescriptive reading programs. Now that was useful.) In any school, two teachers of like mind go much further than one teacher alone. Whole is greater than...

And Will resurrects the blog-ference idea. NWP won't be it. (See 'blogAtlanta': The 2002 Tour.)We got edited down to a measly three hours of Manila, so no experienced blogger is missing much there. O'Reilly is a little over our heads, looking more for developers than practicioners for presentations. We could gather during it, though. BAWP could host a West coast confab in the spring, I think, but it'd be pretty grassroots. There's just no money, though we could probably work out some kind of professional credit hour thing through UC. Maybe IU would want to get involved? We could use MLK's more than adquate middle school labs, Mac and PC, for nothing. Folks could crash in cheap hotels or with local participants. A few days or a week in SF might inspire attendance. But then there's airfare. NWP talked about some sort of week long thing at Marshall U. for summer 2003 but I haven't heard anything about that in awhile and I think they were shaping it for WP teacher consultants. Sebastian mentioned in a blogChat the other night some cool Europe opportunities. If everybody wanted to zoom up to Toronto for ALA/CLA in June, maybe we could find a local piggy back host to give us a lab for a day or two. Hang out with Jenny Levine and the libra-bloggers.

Part of me thinks there are still so few of us that we might happily skip a "conference" setting. Maybe we just find a big mountain or seaside house (East Coast, West Coast, Chicago, Europe, wherever. Hey Will, how about 'the shore'? Barnegat in July?) with DSL and a router, a kind of Tahoe area ski place in the off season. A joint that sleeps 16 and comfortably feeds more. We all bring laptops, drink beer, go for bike rides and cold swims, and blog whenever we feel like it. [Pat Delaney]

3:43:23 AM