Cole W. Camplese

Getting Control of My Out of Control Life

New Year's Resolutions are a joke typically. Even so I am resolving to do something very different this year -- no I'm not joining a gym, losing weight (I've done that to the tune of more than 30 pounds in the last year already), quitting drinking (right), or anything like that. I am going to take a huge step towards finally doing something I've needed to do for years -- get my organization of information in real working order. Since becoming senior director two years ago I have been swimming upstream just to stay afloat. That's not to say I haven't made real progress in lots of ways, it just means that I am on the verge of drowning in content that comes at me in so many direction and at a pace that I am still unable to manage with my own brain. I need help and admitting that is the first step to moving forward.

I read a piece at The Verge by and about how their Features Editor, Thomas Houston uses Evernote to manage everything -- total outboard brain style. It got me really intrigued so I've spent several hours over the course of the last few days thinking critically about the workflow I think could really make a difference for me and I thought I'd share it here to get reactions and provide an opening framework for others to consider. At the heart of the whole thing is Evernote Premium and while I know the free version should be sufficient at $40.00 it gave me two things I needed; the ability to have more monthly upload space (premium gives you a GB to use up each month) and read/write access to notebooks for my administrative assistant (and presumably others as I evolve this strategy). I've been an Evernote user since 2008 and have bounced around various applications to manage note taking since. Now that I spend more time on my iPad Mini than my laptop I need something available across all platforms and I am not interested in storing tons of content locally so I had already returned to Evernote for general note taking. Now I am getting serious.

A common issue for me is this -- I go to a ton of meetings and am a member of tons of working groups, project teams, committees, councils, and task forces. The ones I lead are sufficiently digital, storing agendas, notes, and the like on websites like the eEducation Council site powered by WordPress or the Student Technology Advisory Committee supported mostly by Yammer and WordPress. The problem is that I am not in charge of the vast majority of the groups and they are still doing things with lots and lots of paper. The paper comes in the form of attachments that get sent to all members and their assistants days before the meeting that we are (I presume) to print and put into folders to take the meetings. I don't do that ... I rarely even have time to look at the agenda for more than a scan to make sure I am not actually being asked to lead any part of the meeting. I can't abide the idea of having manila folders stuffed with agendas and handouts anymore, so I need something different. I then end up taking disconnected notes in various forms that end up scattered and highly disorganized. This is a big part of my job and I am failing at being prepared and organized around any of it. This is a perfect use case for Evernote. Here's how I envision it working.

I have several folders in Evernote that are made up of more context specific single notebooks. The screenshot below indicates what I mean ... in each of those stacks are notebooks for each group I am member of, the projects I need to track, and other various things going on around me at any given moment. Easy enough. The new idea here is to have a shared notebook with my assistant where things can be pre and post processed to make things much more organized.

With the above scenario in mind, let me share how I envision this working. A an example, I attend a monthly committee meeting named, The Penn State Online Steering Committee where we spend time addressing the forward strategy driving the growth of our World Campus, setting policy recommendations, and discussing anything that has to do with online delivery. It is a meeting filled with deans, vice presidents, and vice provosts so things get done. It is an important meeting and one that generates a lot of paper. What I envision is as agenda items and associated documents begin to flow in for the meeting that my administrative assistant would construct a single note in our shared folder with all attachments uploaded and included on that note. I would then move it to the appropriate notebook where I could act upon it during the meeting -- taking notes, snapping photos of presentation slides, or even recording audio of portions of the meeting. All of it in one place and not taking up space on my desk in the form of disconnected pieces of content. Below is an example of how it might look with a combination of notes and attachments -- in this case the pre-planning notes and the slides used in a recent meeting with Blackboard.

The other subtle parts to this experience include a few other tweaks to my digital life. The first is using Pocket across all devices to grab stuff to read in the moments I have walking to meetings or the evenings. I used to use Instapaper, but stopped when it didn't work well with my reader of choice on iOS. I am now back into picking things off to read later with Pocket. I am also managing a switch to Chrome with a few very handy extensions to drive it all -- obviously both the Evernote Clipping extension and the Pocket extension are there. But I've also added another Evernote property in Evernote Clearly. It is like the Reader button in Safari, but it adds the ability to highlight articles and automatically drop them into a specific notebook in Evernote with the highlights in place. It works very well.

All in all, there is nothing earth shattering here. I need to do a better job curating the content that impacts my day to day life and I am openly admitting I need help in getting that done. I can no longer rely on the scatter shot methods I've been living with, so I need to resolve to pay closer attention to making it all work better. I'd be interested in hearing what approaches have worked for others and if my described framework seems reasonable.

Short and Sweet

Over the last couple of years most of us have become ultra familiar with link shortening services like tinyurl and bit.ly to save extra characters when using Twitter or for sending out really long URLs in emails. I've heard lots of thoughts on how to make them better and have had more than one conversation about why they could lead to the end of the web -- I think that is probably greatly exaggerated. The argument goes something like, if everyone uses [insert service name here] to share their links and that service goes away, we have no real record of where we were linking to. I have seen instances where tinyurl has been down or eaten links so I've moved away from it.

I have been using bit.y a little more often and this morning took the time to explore what I think is really powerful -- the dashboard style view into what is going on with those links as soon as you send them out. Essentially bit.ly provides you with some nice anayltics into how many clicks you get from sending them out. What I don't know (but would love to experiment with) is if the person who clicks on bit.ly shortend link is also signed into the service, do I get to see that person's username? That would be incredible as part of an open edu focused approach ... I could essentially replace the same kind of click through tracking an LMS offers by simply passing URLs through an authenticated service.

What is interesting to me is that this is yet another very simple piece to a very open and flowing LMS concept -- I've written about the New York Times TimesPeople toolbar before as a simple way to push resources to a cohort ... now in cooperation with something like bit.ly URL tracking I am getting a solid way to see what is going on with those resources. Nothing to earth shattering here, but a little something interesting to think about over the weekend. Anyone have a bit.ly account and want to experiment a bit?

Community Question: Lifestreaming

With the closing of several Google services I've been thinking about some of the content I (and a bunch of other people) publish across the social web. So much that I want to get some ideas about what many of you think about it all. If you step back and think about how many new people are joining and actively participating in social networks, one has to consider where we go from here. What do we do to protect the emergence of our meta identities -- each crafted in small pieces across many networks. As a simple example, take a look at the emergence of Facebook with adults ... according to a new report issued by the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now.

That is a whole lot of people creating lots of real data about themselves and their relationships. Even if you don't worry about closures or server meltdowns, consider the following from a post on Read Write Web:

The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you've posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add "?page=162" to the end of any Twitter user's default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.

I've talked to lots of people who think that their Twitter streams belong to them. The reality is that we are trapping our thoughts, relationships, and content in someone else's microblog. It has bothered me since we used Twitter in my CI 597C course -- much of the course dialogue happened in the backchannel there and much of it is lost. Clearly this only one small example, but I am guessing you get the idea.

So I am curious about what kinds of strategies we should be considering as we continue down this path? I doubt the answer is to stop participating -- the ship has left the port and it isn't coming back in. What do we think?

My Must Haves

Since my last post focused on the potential rise of light weight portable computing systems -- Netbooks, iPhone, and cloud services -- I thought I'd try to follow it up with a list of my must have tools that have enabled me to live more that way. This is just a simple list from my point of view and I doubt it is the same as what somebody else might find necessary to do their jobs. I'd love to hear from you what you think are the next generation of tools that someone living on a light weight portable device might require.

With all of this it is important to note that I also have two other machines I use regularly. I have an iMac on my desk at home connected to a series of hard drives that store pictures, documents, media, and most of my important stuff. It gets backed up a handful of times a day with a combination of TimeMachine and Apple Backup ... I even move a hard drive off site for pictures every so often. At work I have a machine on my desk that I use while there ... the only real reason I use it is because it is connected to a 30" display that lets me get so much more done in short bursts. I don't think I could do without that as my MacBook Air will not drive the display or I would give up that machine altogether.

My job has transitioned mostly into the world of administrative tasks -- lots of meetings, budgets, proposals, notes, and the like. I no longer spend much time writing any sort of code, editing large images, or editing audio and video. I'm not saying I don't do those things from time to time, but my daily grind is built around the production and consumption of information in a mobile environment ... I read a lot, I write a lot, and I spend all sorts of time fighting with my calendar. So with that, here are my new top five "must haves" for living in the new mobile computing Universe (ignoring email and calendar software completely):

• Evernote has become one of my most valued tools. I haven't ponied up for a paid account, so I am using it for free ... I'm not sure I will pay, but the new features of the premiere account have my wondering. I love that I can take, find, and share notes from any platform in an application that is client based but syncs beautifully via the web. The image search is amazing and I just bought a new iPhone case from Griffin with a macro lens adaptor so I can take pictures of business cards and store them there as well. Having things where I need them -- no matter what machine/device I am on is critical. I couldn't imagine going back to a world where I don't have Evernote.
• My blog is still a very important part of how I keep things together. I'm not talking about the WordPress platform at all ... as a matter of fact I use my WordPress blog for personal reasons, while my PSU blog is powered by MovableType. Both serve similar functions, but I have worked out (in my mind at least) a rationale for when I use what. Without the blog space, things get crazy fast. I need a place to write and reflect ... it is just part of how I work through things.
• At work I use a couple of wiki services to keep lots of information up to date. At ETS we have a MediaWiki installation in place for project updates and content creation. At PSU we have a pilot implementation of Confluence that is becoming the defacto place for our larger organizational work. I don't think I'd be able to really function without some sort of wiki service. Just too critical to easily create and share content in an environment like that.
• This may seem like a cop-out, but I am going to lump five online services into one must have ... Flickr, YouTube, La La, Facebook, and BaseCamp are all part of my day to day workflow in huge ways. My Flickr Pro account is a critical piece to my online archiving approach ... I use Aperture at home and tag my favorite pictures with five stars on import. Usually a couple times a month I move those pictures, at full resolution, to Flickr for a social off-site back up solution. I've been using YouTube as a backend storage location for all my video (I no longer keep it on my laptop after import/editing) ... I love that people are there and that I can generate online conversations without any real overhead. La La is a killer online tool that has allowed me to stop carting around gigs of music on multiple computers. They have a nifty uploader that searches your music library and unlocks those songs for online listening. FaceBook has completely replaced email with distant friends. I now keep in contact with a specific network of folks via the FB platform ... I can chat, share pictures, links, updates, and all sorts of stuff without opening any other apps or services. I can see how down the line I could move more of my life to FB. BaseCamp has become the go to place for project management tasks at ETS and I love that I can get to it anytime anyplace. I could never go back to MS Project ... even without the gantt charts, BC rules for me.
• Clearly I still need to edit and create documents, so I do use the Google Doc tools to do word processing, spreadsheet work, and more and more, presentations. I do have iWork on my machine and I do my high end finishing work there, but on a day to day basis I spend most of my office-like productivity time in Google Docs. I do use the collaborative features, but I mainly use it to open and create new Word-compatible documents.

I am guessing there are other tools I use, but this list pretty much sums up what works for me. One that I am still working with and am starting to really like is Dropbox. It creates a local, synchornized folder on each of your machines that lets you move files back and forth. I also have a Mobile Me account that should do the same, but I find the iDisk piece of that to be really too slow. Before I'd pay for Dropbox, I'll give Mobile Me another shot. At any rate, that is my list ... I am curious what tools people find are must haves for managing a mobile existence. Any thoughts?

Our Year in the Cloud?

I have been thinking about the trend towards really small and really cheap laptops -- Netbooks, as they are referred to -- and their use of web-based applications for productivity. I had our IT group order a Netbook (from Dell) before the Holiday break so we can start to better understand the overall affordances of underpowered, cheap, portable machines that manage to do the things most students really need to do relatively easily.

Students tell us that they spend a majority of their computing time checking email, updating Facebook profiles, and logging into ANGEL for course related stuff. We also know that most (upwards of 90%) of our students come to campus with laptops only to leave them behind in their dorms or apartments. They claim they are too big and heavy to carry, the batteries sort of suck, that our classroom desks don't support them appropriately, and that we don't put power where they need it. This could all be set to change this year with the introductions of not just hardware that fits their lifestyles, but cloud-based services that are ready to compete with desktop applications.

If you walk into a Target store (or go online) you'll see sub $500.00 Netbooks mixed in with the iPods and digital cameras. This is a shift from the notion that computers are something special, not just another piece of consumer electronics. I told several people before the Holiday that I thought we'd see a decent percentage of our students return from the break with newly purchased Netbooks just waiting to see how they run in our (and their) enterprise. As long as they can install the PSU Cisco VPN they'll be able to connect to the wireless network in most places, so I am guessing they will want to find ways to take advantage of the new machine sitting in front of them.

They already indicate they spend a lot of time on Facebook (23% of the students who use FB at PSU report spending more than 5 hours a week on it), so I am guessing they are really familiar and comfortable with the idea of storing things in the cloud ... even if they don't fully understand what is going on. This is an indication that if a service emerges that makes their lives more meaningful they will adopt it quickly. This is constitutes an opportunity for us to market some of our emerging services to a new set of eyes and ears (I am thinking of Blogs at PSU and Adobe Connect in particular).

I am betting the use of Google Docs is rising, but is still relatively small compared to Microsoft Office -- with an ultra-portable that will change. Right now I am guessing most students still write in traditional analog notebooks -- with an ultra-portable that may change. The adoption of collaborative tools by faculty has been slowly increasing, but with more students able to actively participate online while in a classroom we'll see a sharp increase there as well. Will the Netbook prove to be the tipping point towards greater utilization of the online services many of us spend quite a bit of time taking advantage of? I am betting on yes.

Aside from Netbooks, the notion of the really powerful hand held device is set to explode as well. The iPhone and now the iPod Touch have emerged as real computing platforms. There are limitations for doing much of the work a student needs to do in a classroom -- namely typing -- but that is merely a hack or a dock away from being taken care of. I almost wonder if the Netbook is a little late to the party ... will iPhones and iPod Touches get the market share first? Perhaps, but no matter how you slice it up the landscape on our campuses is starting to change in a radical way and it is a real opportunity for us to promote technology for teaching and learning in new ways.

I spent at least half of this past year living mostly on a MacBook Air and I have been very happy with my transition to a mostly cloud based portable experience. I don't have Office, Adobe PhotoShop, or many other large apps running on it -- and I don't miss them one bit. I have adopted Google Docs, learned how to use Apple's built in Preview App and iPhoto to do image editing, taken lots of notes in Evernote, listened to my music online at La La, and have used this space and my PSU blog as an outboard brain with much success. I've found relying on local storage as being a limiting factor -- and I am betting that more and more students will move in this direction this year. We are finally seeing the alignment of hardware, interest, and online services come into focus ... I think this could be the year we all start to really get it. Anyone have any thoughts?

Partly Cloudy

I started last month writing quite a bit about living my life in the cloud with my new MacBook Air. I'm now even further into this experiment and I show little sign of turning back. There are a few things that continue to confound me -- when I travel, for example, I take a ton of pictures and don't want to dump them to the Air, but I have little other choice. I hate the idea of having multiple digital versions of the pictures ... this seems like a silly thing, but trying to go completely into the cloud isn't going to work for me. Keynote presentations are a whole other issue, but let's just say I need to have at least a half dozen or more stacks so I can assemble presentations to fit the audience. And no, Google Presenter isn't going to work (yet). So I guess at this point I can't say I have left all local applications behind, but Microsoft Office is no longer part of my routine.

What really prompted this post is Google's announcement of their Chrome open source browser project. What I find interesting about it is that it really looks like a micro-operating system to me. In other words, it will have built in functionality that will allow it to run web applications at new speeds with layers of protection that are usually reserved for an operating system. I'm no specialist here, but the fact that they are writing their own javascript engine (even though webkit already has one) tells me they want to make working with google web apps feel like working on the desktop. Imagine the Google Applications running in a browser that has its javascript tuned perfectly for performance from the applications ... and then add full on Google Gears support and their little browser can now do anything you local app sitting on the OS can do.

If Chrome is successful, I imagine we'll see new breeds of devices that can take advantage of the Chrome/Gears combo in new ways. I know I won't be switching to it for full time browsing, but as my life in the cloud experiment continues I will be exploring it as the alternative for working with my Google Apps. It doesn't look like a Mac version will be first out of the gate, but when it hits I'll be ready. Any thoughts on this one?

Storing and Finding Your Stuff

As I head into Day 2 of the Learning Design Summer Camp here at PSU I am humbled by the power and energy of our community. If you are sitting in Foster Auditorium and can't feel the vibe, then we need to check you for a pulse. Seriously, there are some amped up people. My colleague Chris Millet said to me that the event had the energy and spirit of the Berkman at 10 event he and I attended a while back ... I have to agree this thing has raised the bar.

I took part in several conversations yesterday and most of them centered around digital stuff. From assessing content that is completely distributed in a course (how in the world do Tweets play into a participation grade) to talking about how students obtain copyright on "published" videos they produce in Digital Commons? It got me thinking a bit about the challenges we have in front of us as more and more faculty assign digital activities and more and more students create rich media as evidence of learning. That in and of itself is very interesting, but I am beginning to wonder what it means to us as it relates to storage. With Digital Commons, one of our biggest concerns is providing speedy and reliable storage for creating digital assets. When they walk away from the DC, they want to take it with them ... and as they produce more, the more disk space we need to give them.

Here at PSU, we give everyone one GB for free in their personal space ... I've been talking with people about kicking that up to 5 GB and the discussion seems to have legs. What I am wondering about is the long term personal management of all this stuff. Storing it all is one thing, while finding it quickly is another. What I am thinking about is how to empower people to use their personal space as a virtual disk drive that has real asset management associated with it. I know I keep beating the Blogs at PSU drum, but once again I could see this environment as a critical link between simply storing content and managing content.

It seems to me there is so much more to the question of storing content ... we need to help our students understand how to manage it so they control it more comfortably. I wonder if this is in direct conflict with my earlier post asking if they care where it goes when they upload it. All I know is that in the coming years there is going to be so much more digital content produced and so many more students living in the cloud that we need to go beyond simply throwing disks at the problem ... we need to help move the conversation forward and give them a place for it today and a path to move forward.

As a final thought, I have been doing my best to live in the cloud for the last four or five weeks with much success. I am no longer living on a machine packed with stuff -- I've moved it google docs, IMAP mail, my blog, and more and more into Evernote (BTW, you can now do note editing on your iPhone!). Only once during that time did I have to figure out how to get access to a document that was on my old laptop. When Camp is over I plan on moving the rest of my stuff into the cloud -- managing most of my digital assets with MT and seeing how that goes. I have a feeling it will be just fine.

A Follow Up: Cooperative Notes

After my post on taking notes in the cloud last week I got a number of comments. One of them that seemed to really spark some needed thought was how to engage not just students in the notion of blogging their notes, but how to get faculty into the idea of posting lecture assets in places where the "embed" code lives. Kyle points out that it might make a ton of sense if we could find new ways to help faculty see the value in publishing their slide images, diagrams, or other rich assets to social sites as well to empower students to simply annotate existing assets in the cloud via the use of a simple embed code. I love the idea and I will be discussing it with my team.

Then as I was sitting around thinking more about it over the weekend I started to wonder why faculty would need to publish to the .com social web world when they could use their PSU blog spaces to upload, share, and manage their rich media assets. My friend and colleague, Brad Kozlek, manages a big portion of the Blogs at PSU project and he is very keen on the whole embed thing. As a matter of fact, he has worked out a simple little template addition to the MT code we use to enable simple YouTube-like embed capabilities. Most of this work is modeled after some amazing work by Alan Levine with his Feed2js work and Brian Lamb and his absolute insistence on remixing and reusing content.

Having faculty take advantage of our own blog platform to enable students to enrich their notes is a huge step forward in my eyes. I was talking about students taking pictures of slides and Kyle reminded us that it wouldn't be much of a stretch to have faculty share each slide as an embedable asset from any number of social sites. I love it, but why not right from their blog? Each of these slides could easily be pulled into a student's post with little more than an embed code. Faculty, over time, could create their own slide repository that could be easily shared with their students as embedable content in their blogs, or even within their own courses in places like ANGEL and blog powered pages. Big potential here that we need to really explore.

I like the idea and I wonder how feasible it is to push towards a solution that asks faculty to allow students to take electronic notes in class, share digital representations of their slides/diagrams, and to think about how to best protect and share their own intellectual property in a teaching and learning context. Those are a lot of things to socialize, but I would guess given the time, energy, and ability to share success stories one could get a decent sized percentage working in that direction. In so many cases, we think publishing to the web gives up IP, but I would argue that taking this approach would empower the use of IP in a more open and responsible way. Not sure, but I sure would like to hear some thoughts on this.

Notes in the Cloud

To kick off the One Post a Day project I thought I'd share an idea stemming from a couple data points in the 2008 Faculty Advisory Committee on Academic Computing (FACAC) results. I have been giving the idea of student laptop use a lot of thought lately -- especially in light of the recent advancements in the Blogs at Penn State platform, MoveableType. The report tells us that about 88% of Penn State students at all locations own a laptop computer. What I find terribly interesting is that only about 18% of undergraduate students carry them to campus -- that is compared with a relatively high number of grad students at 42%. When you look at that coupled with a growing trend of faculty permitting/inviting students to use their laptops for note taking has risen to 36% you can see an opportunity emerge. The most disturbing piece to me is that of those that do own a laptop that only 4% actually use them for note taking. This is an opportunity.

As we've been aggressively pursing the Blogs at PSU as an ePortfolio platform for all students it is becoming obvious that the use of a publishing platform like the blogs could be an immensely powerful note taking tool as well. When I was in college I took notes in spiral bound notebooks that were organized like most people's -- chronological order with each course getting its own notebook. This left me with a huge stack of notebooks to carry around and it also meant that over time discoverability dropped to a very low number. My claim is that a laptop paired with the nearly ubiquitous wireless access on our campus connected to the blogging platform should provide an ideal note taking environment.

Imagine a single blog (public or private) that is organized by multiple categories -- perhaps representing each semester, year, subject, and free-tagging of the content being written about -- all together in an always-available, searchable, editable publishing environment. Finding anything would be a breeze, filtering subjects would be a no-brainer, and there is the potential for permanence that my paper-based notebooks did not enjoy. As a sidebar, I lost nearly all my college notebooks when the garage at an apartment I was living in was flooded. So much for going back and ever revisiting work. There also seems something right about storing this in the cloud -- access to thinking from anywhere there is access would be killer.

Can you sketch in a blog? Not really. But the ability to snap quick digital pictures with a cell phone or a built in iSight can get that job done. Why waste time reproducing a diagram on a slide when a simple photo would do. If you get into it, recording lectures on your own, or obtaining them via iTunes U and connecting them to each note entry would raise the stakes as well. I can't seem to understand why this hasn't caught on yet. We haven't even touched on the potential social components here ... adding the ability to share thoughts on your and other notes could move the static notebook into the frame of the 21st century study group -- actively engaging in reading other peoples' notes and sharing thoughts via the comments could add a new layer to the learning opportunities. Not sure if you've heard of outfits like Nittany Notes, where they pay students to take notes and then sell them to the ones not showing up ... sure would be nice to put people like that out of business. I think the social potential for creating deeper connections could be potentially game changing.

I am seeing a big opportunity emerging here and I am thinking about how we can use the extensible nature of our MoveableType implementation to create a more notebook friendly writing environment. Something that invites students in and helps bridge the metaphor gap ... I think there is something real with the mindset of the physical notebook that a contextualized theme and style could help with. So, any thoughts for me related to this little observation? What is going on at your University, college, or department? If you are teaching, would students taking notes, recording lectures, snapping pictures of slides, and openly sharing make you nervous? I think it is worth exploring the creation of a seminar on note taking in a blogging environment.

Organized in the Cloud

As I reflect on my time at the Project Bamboo workshop held at Princeton University last week I am left with a few thoughts. While not as stunning to me as was my Berkman at 10 reflections, the Project Bamboo workshop did leave me with my head swimming with activity. The Project Bamboo workshops focus specifically on the needs of the Humanities community and bringing to light challenges and potential solutions to these newly (or not so newly) discovered issues. Challenges such as research method support, research management systems, tagging, discovery, describing objects that otherwise seem indescribable, and so much more were teased out by the 100 or so participants. During the first day I was struck with something as I spent time in the first table activity -- in a modern sense, we tend to organize materials in the cloud better than we do locally. There was context to this discussion that I won't get into, but it started me down a path that I am interested in exploring more.

Here is a tangible example of what I mean ... on my iMac at home I have probably in the neighborhood of 7,000 local photos of travel, my children, friends, landscapes, and all the other things we take pictures of. Several hundred of them do have some form of meta data assocaited with them -- most are simply tagged with four or five stars, while a few I have renamed or even organized into albums. But at the end of the day there are thousands that are simply disorganized (other than date and other EXIF meta data that comes pre-packaged upon import).

Now, compare that with my Flickr space ... as of today, there are 1,813 photos on Flickr that are tagged, have been given titles, and even several hundred with descriptions. This may seem normal, but I see something sort of strange in it. My personal repository at home is largely disorganized (perhaps miscellaneous) and yet I trust my true organizational structure to a third party in the cloud. It really has me wondering about how one goes about synchronizing the offline universe of local storage with the more structured cloud concept. Where is the application that does that for me?

This is a simple example, but it also makes me think about the literally hundreds of documents I have on Google Docs that are neatly organized with tags compared to the thousands I have on hard drives throughout my home. Why do we do this? I asked my friend and colleague, Bryan Alexander, and he told me as we got on the elevator, "everyone likes to dress up in public." I've thought about that comment and I think there is something to it -- and I know when Bryan reads that he'll say it was an in the moment comment, but it seems to hold true. So what do we think in a collective sense? Does anyone have thoughts they want to explore with me?