It is possible to get a deeper insight into the broadband future by thinking about the challenges faced by people who need to remember a lot of complex information when they are under pressure, analysing new information on the run and presenting arguments persuasively. An example is a barrister presenting a case in court. It is better to never look at notes, keeping the judge or witness in direct gaze at all times. Not having one’s nose buried in notes keeps the barrister’s radar about the court's mood keen at all times. But if resorting to notes does become necessary, it is helpful to have a sense of the location at which a piece of information can be found before the search even starts. The old-fashioned way to do that was, for example, sticking tabs into a pile of papers.
Today’s knowledge management software offers a variety of ways to do the same thing. A widely used “personal information manager”, InfoSelect for Windows (www.miclog.com) arranges information around topics on a vertical tree but lets a particular view of a point in that tree be summoned via user-settable tabs at the bottom of its window. These views enable a snapshot to be taken of a particular point in the database that can easily be returned to. Another popular information manager, The Brain for Windows or Mac, (www.thebrain.com) arranges information in a three-dimensional fly through matrix. Topics of particular interest can be “pinned” to the top of the window for easy location and access. The ability to set a user-configured view of this kind is metaphorically akin to leaving a trail of crumbs through your personal information. You can trace the trail back to a point in your information journey when you want to double back or refresh your memory on the detail of what was there. It is not search; it is more like leaving a place marker.
Some people are more creative when they use this kind of spatial information arrangement. Placing each new piece of information in a position on a mind map is the basic value proposition of software such as Inspiration (www.inspiration.com) and Novamind (www.novamind.com). The relationship between different pieces of information can be presented graphically, which helps someone remember the information, navigate it more easily and recognize possible patterns in it.
Enterprising software developers have recently taken these principles to the next level with a slew of new offerings that are not just graphical but quite visually exciting. An example is PicLens, (www.piclens.com) a download which can be installed in your browser as a plug-in. This allows photos from a Web site such as Flickr, or even videos on YouTube, to be presented on your monitor as a long wall of pictures which fly into view creating an impression of weightlessness as you navigate nimbly to each picture that catches your interest. This is a paradigm which will have increasing value as the kind of information we need to navigate becomes more complex and challenging. We can expect this kind of interface to combine with collaborative multi-party video conferencing such as the cross platform www.oovoo.com video-based networking such as WooMe (www.woome.com) and the significant arrival in Second Life of prim-based HTML hypertext, enabling advertisements and knowledge sharing to occur on the surface of inworld objects rather than in a browser outside the Second Life environment.
The Australian Financial Review explored some of these concepts in an article 11 June ("Browsing takes on a new dimension") which profiled free software called Hyperwords (www.hyperwords.net) which turns every word or phrase on a webpage into a hot link. The article explored how this kind of software allows people to make more connections of the kind that interest them, adding preconfigured searches to the experience and then taking the outcomes and publishing them in blogs, emails, instant messages and social networking sites. A commentator quoted by The Economist (the original publisher of the article), Dave Farber, observed that “without 3D maps we may lose our bearings”. The traditional precursor to these maps was the Electronic Program Guide allowing navigation of large numbers of television channels (and considered in an earlier instalment of this blog). The next evolutionary step is likely to harness some of the advances being made in thought powered navigation (blog.wired.com) and haptic feedback devices (youtube.com).
These trends point to the likely eventual marriage of two of the most ground breaking media areas of our time: social networking and immersive virtual reality worlds such as Second Life (my.bigpond.com/pond/secondlife). It will be a marriage brokered by faster broadband. People will meet and interact with new friends or business associates, faster and with greater satisfaction. People will be able to find information they want and make use of it more effectively because virtual worlds such as Second Life will enable improvements to the very essence of how we organise the information we work with. Entrepreneurs will solve the problem of information bombardment by enabling people to access information, make connections, consult with other people, collaborate on enabling decisions - and do all of this faster - because the raw data will be synthesised within a virtual environment that offers fewer of the traditional “frictions” which retard effective knowledge navigation. But all of this will rely on lightning fast broadband which is affordable and ubiquitous. It is the promised land for knowledge workers. But it is also the battlefield where future Australians will fight to preserve our nation’s status as a first world information economy