Information Paper – Email from Alan

The ‘information scraps’ in this project loom interesting – TOIS paper etc.

Alan

Our goal is to make it easier for people to collect, org…  visualize, and share their information. One of the bigge…  such information management is the rigid, centrally-plan…  models and user interfaces of existing applications and …  data people
at: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/

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Email Alan – Information(5/3/2008)

Alan Dix to me show details 05/03/2008

Reply If these are terms that people said in their transcripts, I could imagine different people using on phrase or other but not really meaning that much different.

However, if the *same* person used both terms I would regard ‘useful’ as being a more inclusive term and weaker one (more things are ‘useful’ than are ‘important’).

For example, in your own research, you might regard all PIM literature as ‘useful’, but paper about to how people choose what to store would be “important”. As to which comes ‘first’ I guess depends on context. (yes one of those REALLY USELESS answers!)

For example (A) if I am looking for literature for a paper I might initially save anything vaguely useful – mentally noting some that seemed really relevant (important) as I do so – and then do a second pass sorting out the really important ones from the rest … here useful first then important

(B) however, in contrast, I might be after a very specific (important) piece of information, but as I am navigating to it I might notice something that I think “that might be useful someday” and bookmark it.

My guess is there at least two classes of things at play here: two about the context * current focus vs. broader interests

* active things vs. things in the future two about the content

* valuable vs. not valuable (wrt to context) * certainty of value and relevance … but I guess could unpack both more! A

Alan – Show quoted text -