Dave’s Whiteboard

Noted by Jane Hart, a tool so lightweight it could almost float away.

DoItDoItDone! lets you create an online to-do list. No registration, no email; your list gets a unique URL (which you can choose to share).

Nothing to include high/medium/low prioritizing (what would the Franklin Covey people think?), but you can drag items up and down the list.  A single click marks a task as complete; a second click removes it from the list entirely.

Is it overkill to have an online application for what a scratch pad could do?  Not if it works for you — you could save your list to Delicious, for example, and access it from any machine.  So could people you’re collaborating with.

There’s a button to display your list on a web page or on your blog.  (Don’t look for my list any time soon.)  You can permit others to edit the list, which means a small group might share a list of tasks, within anybody able to add, edit, or check off a task.

My paper lists get pretty ratty, and the prioritized lists I make in Outlook can leave me feeling overburdened (or guilt-ridden).  I see this as not a bad way to focus on short-term to-dos — the same way I’ll stick a Post-It reminder on the front door so I don’t head out to the bank without the stuff for the safe-deposit box.

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Someone (on Twitter, probably) pointed to Tim O’Reilly explaining Why I Love Twitter. Well worth reading for his viewpoints, including:

• Twitter works like people do: you don’t have to ask permission, you don’t have to become friends.
• Twitter is about quick hits, not extended discussion.
• Twitter transcends the web — it moves easily to different interfaces, even to different devices.

Browsing the comments, I found further thoughts from O’Reilly — not about Twitter but rather the larger sphere of open source. You can find them at the post I link to above, but I’m reproducing one chunk of his thinking here.

He underscores something worth holding on to: rather than looking back (like “replacing X”), work on looking forward (”accomplishing Y”).

If you’ve followed my career as an open source advocate, you should have noted that I’ve always had mixed feelings about free and open source projects whose goal was primarily to create an open version of something else. I feel this way about the GNU vision, projects like the Gimp, and every other free software that’s “against” something instead of “for” something, or that tell people they “ought” to use one piece of software rather than another.

It’s always seemed to me that the most interesting open source projects have their own wellspring, their own itch to scratch.

That’s why I’ve always been a bigger fan of the BSD/Apache free software tradition, which doesn’t look on commercial or even proprietary software as an enemy, but as a choice that reasonable developers can make.

I do agree that open standards and interoperability are good, but I also believe that “open enough” is often “good enough.” Twitter is a network citizen in a way that, say, Facebook or Apple, is not.

I also don’t buy the idea that control by a commercial entity automatically means software is bad. Most open source projects are controlled by a single entity! Just try forking emacs or gcc or the Linux kernel! Sometimes a fork happens to free software projects, but it’s usually because a project has stagnated, not because someone just wants to pull in a different direction. And when it does happen…it’s often destructive, not constructive.

The question is whether the entity in question is a good citizen or not, or whether they abuse their power.

So, for example, I support Apache over IIS and Firefox over IE, because it is clear that Microsoft was trying to control the browser as a way of controlling the web.

I don’t think we have that worry with twitter.

I was especially struck by the non-dogmatic tone of “I also believe that ‘open enough’ is often ‘good enough.’” And O’Reilly reminds me to pay attention to the itches that I should be scratching.

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I mentioned the other day that I’m trying to work more paperless tools into my life.  This isn’t a crusade — I’m rarely a firebrand.  In all honesty, I’m inclined toward inertia, and so I need to prod myself.

I set up a wiki for myself some months back, mostly to see firsthand what the administrative side was like.  I was curious about how to control access to wikis as a whole, or to particular sections.  My hunch (then and now) is that in many work settings, a limited wiki — one with a somewhat defined community — is an easier sell and possibly a more effective tool.

I call my wiki Clio, after the muse of history.  I probably should have used the name of her mom, Mnemosyne (the personification of memory), but that would have been too much typing.

After reading Will Richardson’s Get. Off. Paper. post, Clio and I have been trying new ways to work together.

I have a small spiral notebook for tracking anything I do with my blogs — especially the technical tinkering.  I don’t know PHP (the code that underlies WordPress), and often when I add some plugin (an off-the-shelf piece of code to carry out a specific task), I have some fiddling to do.

My tendency is often to plunge ahead, but the fiddling can go awry.  So I treat the fiddling like a lab experiment and make myself note what I’ve tried, and why.

The other day, I started a new series of posts.  I’ve had some trouble in the past with the In Series plugin, though after trial-and-error I got it to work.  This time, I opened my wiki and turned on Dragon NaturallySpeaking (voice-recognition software).  I can talk (and Dragon can record) faster than I can write with a pen, and so I dictated my experiments with the plugin.

You can click the image below to see a readable version of the resulting entry. (Note that I did do some editing by hand, but Dragon did the bulk of the recording work.)

What’s great about this is that next time I need this information, I’ll be able to search in Clio, instead of leafing through the spiral notebook.

This isn’t exactly a mashup, but for me it’s a productive combination of two tools: my private wiki with Clio maintaining my “knowledge history,” and the voice software that saves me 90% of the typing.

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Many thanks to Helene Blowers of Librarybytes for highlighting this mock debate on the merits of wikis versus blogs:

Blowers is director of digital strategy for the Columbus (Ohio) Metropolitan Library, so she knows firsthand the challenges that these vital institutions face. They’re being squeezed between increased demand for a wider range of service and the constricted budgets of local governments.

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Will Richardson urges me to Get. Off. Paper. Well, he’s urging his educator colleagues, but the message resonates.

“Just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room,” he says, “paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards…it’s everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, ‘paper trained,’ and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.”

I recognize the urge to keep things on paper (and if you visited my office, you’d agree).  Not everything of value has yet been digitized, and not every digital fixed expression should have taken the trouble.

Richardson nonetheless has a sound point.  I’ll combine it with my own belief: most people move more readily from the concrete to the general, rather than vice-versa.

Certainly that’s true for me.  I remember watching a clip of a teacher making a presentation to a group of his peers.  At the start, he showed a Delicious link and said, “You don’t need to write any of the other links down.  They’re all at this one.”

I hadn’t seen that before (and, alas, hadn’t thought of it).  That clear example changed the way I thought about social bookmarks.

Just as I don’t think most people hear the message behind “you should try a wiki,” I don’t think they hear “get rid of all that paper.”  I’m recalling some recipes that a vegetarian published.  His title?  “From Beef to Beans in Ten Short Years.”

This low-key humor said, “I’m not trying to correct your life.”  Also, “these recipes are pretty good.”  I think I’ll do better by offering you roasted winter vegetables — or, even better, clapshot — than by explaining how most people don’t understand rutabagas.

The more stuff I keep off paper — like these blog posts — the more open I am to expanding that.  My wife and I actually did some of the planning for our (very small) wedding via wiki — so that either of us could add or change ideas from work without having to email the other.

I’m now tinkering with keeping project logs on my wiki, instead of in separate Word documents — both so I can get to them even if I’m not at my computer, and so that I can search.  (A private blog might work as well, but I’m giving the wiki a try for now.)

“Concrete ideas” photo by caffeineslinger.

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