Wikipedia Redux

Lat year, when Wikipedia was still a discovery to be made even for many in the technorati, I effused praise. Since that time I've had a chance to use it quite a bit more as well as to read both cogent and highly informed (such as from a past editor of Encyclopedia Brittanica) and more emotionally-derived opinion. My intent here (for now) isn't to debate Wikipedia's governance model or how it could be better--but rather, a year or so later, how I feel about it. Is the Open Source model working in this case? Certainly quite a few people seem to be skeptical--even on such profoundly Open Source venues as Slashdot. Perhaps the raw democracy of Wikipedia clashes with the inherit elitism of Open Source projects where some "expert" (even if self-appointed) is the ultimate arbiter of what gets included.

Well, I still feel pretty good about Wikipedia. Up to a point. And with some specific reservations.

In general, when I'm looking for facts--or at least a jumping off point to find and confirm facts--about topics historical, technical, and cultural. Wikipedia's a pretty darned good jumping-off point. It may not be the ultimate authority and it may or may not have the level of detail that I need, but it's a solid start. And if the text, as twisted and pulled by the efforts of too many non-professional editors, isn't the crispest or the smoothest, that doesn't devalue the information too much. Encyclopediae never were Nabokov.

That said, Wikipedia users would benefit by understanding its limitations--just as they would by understanding the limitations of National Review, The Nation, supposedly authoritative scholarly books, or even the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

For example, it's been said that news is the first draft of history. News is inherently non-authorative. While the bombs are dropping, it's unrealistic to expect the writer to understand or know all the precedents, background, particulars, and consequences. The better journalists get most of the facts right and understand the context better than most, but their accounts are still inevitably incomplete.

Yet, Wikipedia effectively tries (through its community) to integrate news as it happens--and doesn't do a great job of it--for all the reasons that those journalists who write history do it years later.

Wilipedia also struggles with controversy. It's got various mechanisms that attempt to deal with the push and pull of radically different opinions. But, for any controversial subject, the ultimate result is (at best): "here are some of the arguments; make up your own mind." Perhaps the best answer in some situations where expert opinion is legitimately divided; much less so when a small but vocal minority strongly contests the majority view. These issues are particularly pronounced in the dark corners. The biographies of George W.Bush and Jon Kerry will at least be viewed and debated by partisans from both sides. More obscure religious, ethical, and scientific debates may n ot be.

In spite of these limitations, I find Wikipedia an increasingly valuable resource. But you'll use it best if you understand its limitations.

Open Source Incivility Redux

For the most part, I try to keep mostly out of the politics and inside-the-beltway debate around Open Source and concentrate on the technology and what it means for users. But every now and then it all bursts forth. Thus my Open Source Incivility note of a while back which garnered the expected volume of comments--some thoughtful, many illiterate and foaming at the mouth.

However, a blog by a fellow analyst and former colleague of mine, Steve O'Grady, prompts me to comment. Apparently Yankee Group's Laura DiDio has been getting late-night calls at home from the less civil members of the "community." I have no reason to doubt the veracity of these claims; one sees plenty of people online trying to track down cell phone and other numbers from other Open Source critics such as those involved with the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute.

I don't know Laura personally. I do know she's done a number of TCO studies concerning Linux and Windows that have the usual problems of TCO studies; the numbers depend a lot on the situation and therefore are hard to generalize. Thus I'm pretty skeptical of most studies that purport to show X cheaper than Y in the general case.

However, the "community's" critique of Laura started much more specifically. It started, as much of Open Source fervor currently is focused, around the SCO case. As one of the analysts who looked (under NDA) at snippets of SCO Unix code side-by-side with Linux code, she concluded that they were, in fact, identical. The community reaction was vicious. After all, Laura wasn't a programmer. Who was she to compare code?

Without recapitulating the whole matter, suffice it to say that there was identical code. It's unlikely that the matches have any significance from a copyright law perspective. But there are matches. I wouldn't sign SCO's NDA but they did show me the Linux code that was purportedly the recipient of the copying. It wasn't hard to track down the ancestral Unix code. And I have been a programmer. Not that one needed to be to see that various blocks of code matched quite clearly. Rob Enderle--who I realize many in the Open Source community also like to pillory--details the history quite accurately; initial claims of "there was no code copied" transmorgified to "the copied code doesn't matter."

I'm inclined to agree that it doesn't matter and that the quantity we've seen is small. But that's certainly little justification to pile on someone who merely confirmed the facts--there was some identical code--and even less to intrude on their personal life.

Onfolio Serendipity

As I noted earlier, one of the things that annoyed me about Microsoft OneNote was its relatively weak tools for capturing information off the web. Basically you can do the usual cut & paste thing or you could snapshot part of the screen but that's about it. Even just capturing a full web page takes unofficial add-ons and, even then, you end up with an image file--i.e. something that you can't search.

But OneNote did get me thinking about capturing research materials from the web. After all, it's something I spend a lot of time doing as an analyst but don't really have a great system for. I end up with a messy combination of bookmarks (mostly unorganized), printouts, and saved HTML files (also mostly unorganized). Enter Onfolio.

In a nutshell, I'm absolutely sold on Onfolio as a research tool and as an RSS aggregator. It integrates right into your browser (Firefox in my case although it also works with Internet Explorer) as a sidebar. It can capture complete web pages and even complete web sites. It's searchable. It can export. One can even take notes with it although I haven't been primarily using it for that. Maybe I'll start now that I've decided to keep it. There's a free download of the beta 2.0 version available on the company's site. If you do any amount of web-based research (doesn't everybody?), definitely give it a look.

Here are some more details from one of the developers, Joe Cheng:

We provide the familiar hierarchical-folders organization model, but also provide extremely fast full-text search (including a find-as-you-type mode) and Search Folders a la Outlook 2003. We are also way more suitable for capturing stuff from the web, as that is really our primary focus. (Our actual note-taking abilities are more of an afterthought, compared to capturing existing files and web content, but should still be a lot better than what you're doing now.)

We also provide several ways to bulk export items. You can drag the root folder of a collection to the file system; your notes and captured web pages will become MHT files. You can use our Web Publishing feature to "publish" a collection to a local directory, which will give you HTML for your notes and captured web pages. And finally you can use our included cfs2xml command line utility to export a collection as XML + data files.

Onfolio 2.0 Release Candidate is currently available as a free download on www.onfolio.com, when the final version comes out there will be $30 and $100 editions (the latter is intended for professional researchers).

Tablet PC, Phantom PC

A few of my recent posts have had me passing over various software packages because I don't have a Tablet PC. Am I an oddball (at least in this particular regard)? Hardly. Although "pure," that is, no keyboard Tablet PCs have always seemed a bit of an oddity--most of us who have used computers for a long time can type faster than we can write--it really seemed to me a couple fo years back that hybrids would become one of those convergence devices that really clciked. Type on them like a regular notebook when you had hardcore typing to do. Fold the screen back and write on it when you had more graphical tasks to accomplish like annotating a Powerpoint slide.

But didn't happen. Perhaps the hardware never got reliable enough or close enough to the prices of regular notebooks. Perhaps Microsoft never put on the full-court press needed to get people really thinking about a new notebook model as suggested here.

In any case, it seems a bit of a pity. Even if we've become pretty good typists, there are a lot of things we can't easily do with a keyboard. And hauling our Wacom Tablets around really isn't a very good option.

Notes and Mind Maps

If someone hasn't preached the gospel of mind maps to you yet, don't worrry--they will. I'm not going to delve into them in any depth here, except to note that a lot of people are big devotees of them for note taking. Personally, I've fiddled with them a bit for organizing thoughts for presentations but I haven't found them as useful for taking notes. Perhaps it's because I don't use a tablet or Tablet PC--which is useful if not required. Perhaps it's because I tend to take down a lot of "data" when I'm note taking rather than a "sparse array" of connecting threads and thoughts. I suspect an editor is better for the former; a mind map may be good for the latter. This was brought to mind by a particularly interesting discussion on the subject over at Creating Passionate Users. For a free taste of what mind maps are about, you may want to give FreeMind a look.

Text Editing Rediscovered

So, what do you suppose I settled on after spending way too much time over several weeks testing various programs for notetaking? (OneNote and Evernote were just the tip of the iceberg; I tried out just about anything remotely relevant that was Open Source, freeware, or had a usable demo. Nothing quite floated my boat.)

Drum roll, please.....

A text editor. It's fast; it can restart with the same windows open; it can easily search in a directory; it can have multiple windows open etc. To my thinking, for this purpose--that is, notetaking rather than programming--Edit Plus works best for me. But I recognize that editors can be a very personal and idiosyncratic choice. In any case, Edit Plus has nots of nice features for this kind of use--like easy access to wordwrap on/off, a nice directory screen, and a fairly unclutered appearance. But, as I say, I'm not going to try to argue anyone into a particular text editor style. It's not free, but at $30 it's cheap enough.

Mind you, I'm not totally happy with this option. For example, a text editor doesn't let me associate other files with my notes by embedding it. Nor does it let me embed graphics. I guess I'll have to fire up a full fledged word processor for those occasions when I need something more. But it's feeling like what I'll use for now in this imperfect software world.

Evernote, A free OneNote Alternative

Evernote's a free notetaking program (for Windows) somewhat in the same vein as Microsoft's OneNote. It's not Open Source, but it's a free beta; the authors apparently intend to keep a basic level of the program as freeware while possibly charging for some more advanced feature. Free is good. But is the program itself good enough to replace OneNote?

For my needs, the answer is a qualified yes. It's less polished in some ways. The particulars are a bit hard to describe but I'd call it "rough around the edges." Things just don't necessarily work like you expect them to. Also, a number of features are still missing--notably, any export function besides basic cutting and pasting. It also lacks a lot of OneNote's more sophisticated Tablet PC and file sharing support, but that was fine with me.

Evernote does have some nice points. For one thing, if its user interface is still a bit rough, it also avoids OneNote levels of garishness. More importantly, it also lets you view your notes on a time axis (rather than the usual hierarchical organization). This is a very nice feature that should be a standard. After all, how many times do you know about when you took a note about something, but not where you put it.

However, at the end of the day, Evernote and OneNote are alike in a way that I've decided is probably a showstopper for me. They lock your notes up in a proprietary file format with no way to do a mass export to something more standardized. Maybe if I were to find a program that just blew my socks off and would automatically export all my notes to a hierarchical collection of Rich Text Format files or whatever I might change my mind. But, for now, I've shifted my focus to organizing standalone files in standard formats.

Notes and Notetaking

An adventure into collaborating with oneself--starting with Microsoft OneNote.

In my business, I do a lot of notetaking: briefings, snippets of ideas, etc. My modus operandi, of late, has been mostly just to fire up the old word processor and drop it in in 'My Documents' or some appropriate subdirectory. Through some some combination of appropriate file nameing, sorting by date, or--as a last resort--Google Desktop Search, I can usually more or less find what i'm looking for. (Hold the thought about search, by the way, more on this later.) Yet, I couldn't escape the feeling that there had to be a better way to do this.

The logical jumping off point for a possible better answer was Microsoft OneNote. It turned out to be a good starting point--not because I ultimately added it to my toolkit, but because it got me thinking about what I really needed and why.

OneNote really isn't a bad program, but it didn't meet my needs at the end of the day. Yes, it keeps a bunch of notes in one place using a sort of notebook+sections hierarchy. That's the good news, but as I used it over the course of several weeks, I became more and more dissatisfied.

• It may be a minor aesthetic point, but the program is UGLY. Steve Jobs would have the designer flogged and put in stocks in front of Apple headquarters. Add in all the cutesy icons for ToDo, the garish colors, the note backgrounds and the like and it really is an assault on the senses.
• The organization is aggressively hierarchical. No keywords, no date-order sorting outside of the hierarchy.
• External capture from web sites is weak. Yes, you can easily capture a screen clip, but capture of complete web pages, much less multiple pages, isn't directly supported. Microsoft provides "PowerTools" that help out a bit--but only for Internet Explorer. OneNoteImageWrite lets you "virtually" print a web page from FireFox into OneNote--but it's a non-searchable image. Overall, I didn't find OneNote a great tool for capturing information from the web although others disagree.
• The notes pages have some non-word processor features that let you put notes on the margins and the like--but my impression is that this sort of feature is far more useful for Tablet PC users than the rest of us.
• Sharing and collaboration features--don't really care.
• At $100, it's not ridiculously pricey but hardly inexpensive.
• Finally, something that started to really bother me as I loaded in more and more information, it uses a propritary format with no easy way to mass export to a more standardized format. Although it's easy to jump on Microsoft for this, this is a common failing of many such programs. I don't want to be stuck with using a particular program forever just because it's the format my data's stored in.
  

OneNote's not terrible. But it is flawed, especially for non-Tablet PC users and for those who are looking for a real research tool as well as a note taking one. However, it did get me thinking about what I needed and what I didn't.

A First Post

Actually more of a continuation. I had a rather moribund blog in place here previously. However, when I decided to get back to work so to speak, I discovered that some configuration changes were causing major problems with posting to my NATed web server. I'll post some more details later but to make a long story short, I decided to just go ahead and start a new blog hosted by Blogger.