Visual repositories: the real logbook
For some time now I have been using two tools, Pinterest and Flipboard, to store interesting content found in the course of my daily news browsing. Flipboard’s example should be copied, and responds to a strategy that its co-founders have gradually applied, and that has today made it a very different tool from the one it appeared to be when it started out. Pinterest is equally interesting, because from the start its founders wanted it to be something open, and that would take shape according to the needs of its users. Many of Pinterest’s functions, such as its ability to generate RSS feeds simply by adding /feed.rss/ to the user’s address on the navigator bar, seem to exist mainly to explore their possibilities, rather than serving any specific purpose yet.
Over time, both tools have become what to all intents and purposes is my real logbook: although some years ago the term logbook would have used sometimes to refer to the blog, the truth of the matter nowadays is that I increasingly feel that my logbook is not the blog anymore, but these type of content repositories. A blog, by now, is clearly something else: I can use it to find something that I said or thought at a particular time, but what really record my passage through the web are tools like these.
For me, the secret of their success lies in them being simple visual tools: in both cases all I need is a button on the browser that allows me to move items to the storage area in two or three clicks. In my case, I try to apply some criteria: I usually place the news items that I have found most interesting there; carefully selecting the source or sources that have addressed the news in the best way. But beyond my own use, I think that the most interesting question here is about directionality: the blog is an exit, highlighting interesting things for other people; while tools like Flipboard or Pinterest are entrances to my information ecosystem. A blog stores the results of navigation, which come from the external environment around whoever wrote in it. For me, blogs are now something else.
At the same time, and also via a button on the navigator bar, I continue to use Delicious (I used Google Bookmarks for a while, but it served only to make me realize its limitations), but only applied to internal needs: it is becoming the place where I store things that I might want to reuse or use for my own reference purposes, typically related to my professional work or my hobbies (which in my case are closely related).
Delicious is a much more powerful tool than Pinterest or Flipboard, which would benefit from a powerful search function that allowed the user to rummage about in one’s own or others’ archives, and lack its visual brilliance (unnecessary, however, for a tool that was created with other aims in mind). Delicious is, in many senses a research tool: a search using Delicious allows the user to access a curated version of the web that has been filtered already by users, where only stuff that is worth saving makes the grade, and the results are, on many occasions much more interesting than those produced by the best search engine.
Similar, although with greater time limitations due to its ephemeral nature, is the way I use favorites on Twitter: either by storing something that somebody has told me about and that I find interesting, or to store a link to something that I don’t have time to read at that moment.
Tools evolve over time, as does the way we use the net. For me, the main problem related to using the web as a work tool is its sheer size and the need to upgrade my memory to allow me to access what I find at a given moment. My information entries are increasingly varied: mostly RSS feeds, but also an infinity of social sources and processes based, in many cases, on nothing more than serendipity. Tools that are simple, attractive, and comfortable to use to record what you have read and that allow you to retrace your steps are now, more than ever, a vital necessity.
