«Serendipity», «Virtual Spines» e «Encountering Information»

To good to miss: Naomi Dushay, Visualizing Bibliographic Metadata - A Virtual (Book) Spine Viewer, October 2004:

"Rather than replicate the appearance of physical book spines, or even the specific information presented on them, the goal is to enable information discovery with a computer-mediated approach. Exploring new capabilities only available with non-physical, virtual book spines, hereafter referred to as spines or virtual spines, is a good place to start. (...) Virtual spines can be in multiple locations simultaneously, (...) can be organized for multiple characteristics simultaneously (...) can be re-organized instantly at the behest of any user (...) can be visually richer than physical book spines (...) [and] can provide a context-sensitive appearance.

What made me «click», while reading this paper, was the ability to switch from considering only the scoop on «Books» to «Weblogs». On practicing the use of blogs in our daily lifes we come to understand the meaning of information encountering [see works by Sanda Erdelez] on a serendipitous way [define serendipity]. Many of us feel that when it comes to organizing information is not a question of trees vs. webs because they are both needed in diferent ocasions for different reasons. This may not be attributed to bloggers but due to the fact that we are also active information seekers [and producers... ;-)].

So where's my point?

Visualizing information is an importante way of discovery and alpha prototype viewer that Naomi Dushay reports might be a step forward for the integration of weblogs in organizational settings [and of course, for my own personal information managment: i've been wishing for a long time to be able to «see» all the connections i've been making in this last months on B2OB & BlogTese with my work]