Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
On data storage and applications going cloud (Surfulater, Mindjet et al.)
Ath:
Radio Erivan to Ath: You'd be right at the end of the day. But these are the appetizers only.
-helmut85 (January 21, 2013, 02:12 PM)
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<snippet stopped>
When writing forum posts that look like essays, who do you think hope is going to read it?
Probably I don't understand...I'm here mostly because of the technical nature of this 'beast', not to read 2 pages of text about some subject that isn't clear from the title (my fault, probably), and I usually fall asleep/stop reading about 3 sentences, because of TL;DR;
I am known (by colleagues) for long, side-tracked, technical talks, but this...
Even your answer is quite side-tracked, as in being not an answer to the question for about 90% of what you wrote...
PS, not a personal grudge against any of you, but just checking to see if you know what's happening in other people's heads. (that's where I sometimes hit just beside the nail :-[)
helmut85:
I'm very sorry you didn't find any idea applicable to your own workflow here, and indeed I was just a little bit disappointed that Aaron Swartz' premature death didn't give rise to any obituary here, before mine, and which didn't trigger any thought about that guy and his mission expressed here. As for my wearing out the servers, I'm not so sure that some text takes so much more web space than lots of unnecessary and often rather silly graphics adult men regularly post here just for fun, so I hope that I will not attract too much wrath on my head too early, by trying to share some ideas in a constructive way. Thank you.
40hz:
I was just a little bit disappointed that Aaron Swartz' premature death didn't give rise to any obituary here, before mine, and which didn't trigger any thought about that guy and his mission expressed here.
-helmut85 (January 21, 2013, 05:32 PM)
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There has been some debate here about political and related topics. And many at DC (including our host) feel this is not really an appropriate venue for it.
So if the membership doesn't more quickly jump on some of the topics you find interesting and important, please consider that some of us here (who do have very strong social consciences and often outspoken and highly political opinions on many tech related issues) have been making a conscious effort not to get into as much of this sort of thing as we have in the past.
Considering there are numerous other web venues where political discussions are both welcome and encouraged, it's not particularly burdensome for most of us to take much of it elsewhere.
With apologies for the silly graphic posted by an adult man up above. ;) ;D
Paul Keith:
So this is rather theoretic situation not really to be feared.-helmut85
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It's not theoretic.
It is at heart somewhat of the old dream of the advanced clipboard managers.
OneNote, RedNotebook, Makagiga, Knowsy Notes, ConnectedText...even the online version of Netvibes have this at heart.
But there is another aspect to my concept which I have overlooked to communicate: It's annotations in general. For pdf's, many people don't use the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader but (free or paid) alternative pdf readers / editors that allow for annotations, very simple ones or more sophisticated ones, according to their needs.
But what about downloaded, original web pages, then?-helmut85
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Send to Kindle for the rich guys.
For the others, it depends on the HTML but for straightforward attachments, this is where Sticky Notes Software claim to be the best.
I personally worry less about how the annotations are made (I dislike both the PDF and paper way of doing it) and worry more about how the thing would create a holistic PersonalBrain but one with more room for notes. (I prefer Compendium).
Once you figure out the latter, the former follows.
So my system is about "neatness", "standardization", "visual relief", but its main advantage is, it allows for my just re-reading the formatted passages when re-reading these web pages in work context, just as many people do with their downloaded pdf's. Now you with downloaded web pages: It's simply totally uneconomical, and the fact that out of 20 people, perhaps 19 do it this way, doesn't change this truth.-helmut85
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Does not work that way.
Out of 20 out of 20 people, they think they don't need a full webpage until they lost a copy.
They just don't realize it until they lose it but it's only 1 out of 20 that would really read that much to lose a critical data piece from a web clipper like Surfulator.
If you do not believe me, compare this to the resurgence in e-reader bookstores.
When my Kobo broke, I thought that I was just losing the hardware but because the experience honed in me the idea of mass sending the e-books inside, even when I could still restore the e-books (it works fine except load the books or sync with the software) I could not get used to reorganizing these sets of e-books in Calibre or manually.
My tolerance level has simply disappeared but I did not have this tolerance before I got an e-ink reader. Not even when I was viewing 1 or 2 e-books via a tablet e-reader software and I was using the first version of Kobo which was so slow at just flipping through the libraries of books.
Everyone has these tolerance levels but they just don't realize it until it hits them like a tornado destroying the habitat that you created outside of nature. What you view as collectors are in fact a sub-breed for the non-collectors to exist. It is like a torrent sharing ecology in which in order to have the poorer person torrent a bunch of books or download a game, first you have to have a selfish sub-breed that simply collects and shares and in turn replaces your rss feed with a curating feed until corps like Valve make idiots out of the sharing community by motivating some to say that Steam convinced them to stop pirating cause now the games are cheap...blah, blah, blah.
This is the evolution of the audience for these software and the difference they have over Evernote and plain webclippers. You have to be hit by the internet or you have to be hit by the fact that most webclipping social curation sites are online or you have to be hit by the fact that you need to quickly store manuals instead of just copies of receipts because you're not even average at remembering troubleshooting software links. You have to be hit by lots of things to understand a "gift".
I'm one of those people who can backup to text files and forgot those text files or even be reluctant to reload Scrapbook Plus files out of an irrational fear for a lack of a one click restore and merge button that's as friendly as logging changes as online sites like Dropbox do, for example.
It's hitting that one range that really widens your eyes. Until then it's like saying I don't need an Antivirus, I'm careful with my PC or I'd rather be able to learn Linux cause it has a legal way to slipstream LiveCDs until something breaks in Linux that does not have a .exe where as Windows has it.
It's so peculiar because it's so interfacey. Lack of one button...even a complete webpage is gone. Lack of full webpage image design...the desire to read the text is gone. Lack of torrent under government pressure then no bridge towards UseNet.
Something that full web clippers have over bare bones text clippers with some images will never understand is this accidental clipping of a sites primary web design imagery into our brain that simply can't be replicated by mere data unless you work at the web clipper like it's a full time PIM but that's where most people don't. That's what's creating the 19 out of 20 illusion.
That illusion can be broken but it has to eventually get to a point where content producers meet content archivers meet curators and sharers who are willing to perform a new database of absorbing web information and go beyond what pay services like HyperInk do for blogs.
...and it can only march on so long as these remnants like Surfulator continue marching on when there are other services like Instagram that can do less and earn more or these services like Quora make it harder and harder to just capture the public web.
Hence my assertion that sw like Surfulater et al. is for "web page collectors", but of not much help in real work. I say this under the provision that these progs, just as pim's, don't have special annotation functionality for the web pages they store; if I'm erroneous about this, I'd be happy to be informed about these in order to then partially review my stance; partially because the problem of lacking neatness would probably persist even with such pdf-editor-like annotation functionality.-helmut85
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It's not about being erroneous so much as it's being ahead. The PDF editors way are phased out. They are an archaic way of doing things that only work out because PDF is such a tricky thing to edit to begin with.
The landscape now is all about combining the feel of Google Docs collaboration but into a full blown personal webpage that's not so much preserved as extended.
So far as special annotation functionality...PIMs have these for awhile but it's web clipping they lack and a polished overall professional output.
Just look at how Knowsy Notes can deal with csv creation. Just look at how dotEpub can convert webpages into e-books.
What's not being brought to the casual user is that type of conversion without requiring any editor knowledge.
What's worse is that some of the actual experiments are web services and not personal files.
(For pages with lots of such data, I do an .mht "in case of". We all know that "downloading tables" from html is a pain anyway if ever you need lots of the original data, but if you do, and frequently, there is special sw available for this task.)-helmut85
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...and that's one of the crux of it.
If you can't work towards preserve, then these things will always require some kind of software or only fulfill one kind of need.
The more a software can just preserve, the more things can be built off of those preservations.
nevf:
Hence my assertion that sw like Surfulater et al. is for "web page collectors", but of not much help in real work.
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I don't and have never seen Surfulater as a tool to collect web pages. On the contrary it's focus is retention of selected content from web pages. ie. Select content and then either create a new Surfulater article containing it or append the selected content to an existing article. Of course Surfulater can also grab entire web pages, but you typically get too much extraneous content and bloat the database.
My work flow with Surfulater is precisely this: select the bits of content I want to keep and capture those, add appropriate tags and cross-references to related articles. Add my own notes and possibly highlight specific content. Next ... The evolution of Surfulater into a Web/Cloud app (1, 2, 3) retains this same focus.
-Neville
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