On Paperwork vs. Digital Formats

tired: Our customer's paperwork is profit. Our own paperwork is loss.[1]

wired: Your proprietay data format is loss. Our proprietary data format is profit.

I'd remembered the first aphorism from a long-ago collection of Murphy's Laws.

Thinking through my struggles at organising online and digital media, references, etc., I realised that a huge problem is that these formats don't serve my goals. They're designed far more around their authors' goals, or even more often, the publishers' goals, largely around advertising, marketing, tracking, building lock-in, creating and defending monopolies, and the like.

Digital formats that are in the end-user's interest and specification serve the user. Those that are in the publisher's specification serve the publisher.

A related thought is that a key affordance of printed periodicals (newspapers, magazines, journals) is that of garbage collection, to put a contemporary spin on it.

When you're done reading a newspaper or magazine, you pick up the whole lot and throw it out. There's an intermediate level of organisation other than "the article" and "the whole collection" (that is, everything published in your office or home), "the issue". (Or perhaps a box or shelf of archived media.) That is, _there are multiple naturally-occurring levels of aggregation.)

When you're trying to sort through a set of browser tabs, you generally have only two levels of aggregation: the individual tab, or the entire session. There are typically no intermediate levels, and sorting through what you want to keep (or re-read, or work with) means you've got to go through the set one at a time and resolve disposition. The data format serves the browser vendor, but not the user.

Tools such as Tree-Style Tabs, an absolutely essential Firefox extension, give a higher level of natural organisation, the tab tree. Here, a structure emerges, without user effort, of related content. At the top of the tree is whatever page began an exploration, and as you descend it, you go further down into the search. When cleaning up, it's possible to pick any given tab, branch, or whole tree, and close it out in one fell swoop. Garbage collection costs are reduced.

(Three guesses as to what I've been attempting to do, and the first two don't count.)

#media #paperwork #DigitalMedia #DigitalFormats #FileFormats #DataFormats #kfc #docfs #UserCentricDesign #TreeStyleTabs