The content problem in brief

This is pretty much my browser.  In a classic case of irony imitates irony, I was (and am) in the process of tracking down and killing browser tabs, PDF sessions, and clearing out downloaded videos (because in-browser video players suck and consume too many resources) to free up some workspace.

I make very little use of chat, thankfully that distraction doesn't affect me much.

The frustrations:

There's too much content:  I first realized this in the last millennium walking into the library at university.  There was no possible way I could read everything there, or even have a good sense of what each section contained, as I had my secondary school library. Followed shortly by the realization that I didn't have to.

Good content discovery is hard: One advantage of the old, broadcast, curated world was that there were a relatively small number of arbiters of What Was Worth Knowing:  a few national TV networks, a city paper or two, a national paper, newsweeklies which actually contained news (and solid analysis of it) -- TIME magazines health piece by Brill is one of the first memorable items I've seen from the magazine in years, possibly decades.  And if you had a countercultural bent, a few places to turn to be rebellious.  The old cartoon of a bunch of suits facing a bunch of hippies with the collective thought balloon "Conformists!" above all had a deep truth.

It's very difficult to stake out the good stuff:  Identifying and illuminating high-quality content is hard.  In an echo chamber, what's authoritative?  Worse:  once you find an authoritative source (or even aggregator), how do you realize that its title has slipped?  Even today, many key documents still largely exist offline, in silos, or are otherwise non-free.  Change is the only constant.  

The attention economy is sacrificing information for attention:  Far too many websites, blogs, aggregators, etc., don't seek to inform, but simply to gain and hold attention.  We get multi-paginated articles, slideshows, lists, references to references to references.  Stories whose main drive is to evoke emotion, often outrage, rather than inform.  And I'm not above either falling for this or even committing the same myself.  But a result is that for all ...

Useful aggregators still push junk:  Reddit, HN, G+, HuffPo, even news sites tease rather than inform.  There's insufficient microcontent (HN & Reddit especially) to determine if a link is worth following.  So you end up with a dozen pages opened, or two dozen, or ....   Which you've then got to visit, parse, and make a "read or not read" decision.  If your name is +Robert Scoble and this is your full-time job, this may be acceptable.  Some of us have other things we need to do.  Or at least should.

Our end-user content management tools are sadly lacking:  PDF readers and browsers especially.  I'm slightly more partial to e-book readers, which are starting to show a concept of a library (or libraries), bookshelves, and even multiple reading stacks.  PDF readers are a last-gasp retrograde technology bowing to the tyranny of print layout to the expense of online utility.  There's no sense of a library, filenames are often the only organizational principle, yet are highly nondescriptive.  Deep links into documents are impossible.  State is lost between readings -- you cannot simply open a PDF to where you last were.  Few PDFs exhibit useful internal structure (links, indices, contents, sections, thumbnails).  Embedded readers violate principles of both Web browser and PDF reader UI.  The Web addresses many of these shortcomings, but is so utterly without form and structure that organizing reading falls flat.  For many of us, tabs don't correspond to things we need instant access to, but are a "current content" list of material we're trying to work through, or are presently referencing.  It's NOT necessary for all tabs to be fully up-to-date, or even rendered (yet another of my tab sets is researching just this issue: how to open links in background tabs but not load or render them until they're actually viewed).  But I should be able to switch to a tab, and have state preserved -- my place in a document -- when I go there.  Much as an ebook does.

Bookmarks are increasingly useless: I'm increasingly frustrated with bookmark features of both Chrome and Firefox.  With the latter's sidebar, why can I not simply drag a page, tab, or its URL straight into the bookmark hierarchy and indicate where I want it to go?  Editing operations are painfully slow and error prone.  The context menu's "Bookmark this page" option brings up a non-resizable dialog that's far too small to effectively navigate and view even a modestly interesting bookmarks structure.  Tools to search bookmarks for stale links don't exist.  Sharing bookmarks between systems, browsers, and/or devices, absent privacy-invading social tools, is exceptionally difficult at best.  Chrome's bookmarks bar is more responsive than Firefox, but is in virtually all other ways functionally much poorer.

Content-related apps are heavy:  On an 8GB laptop, Chrome with a couple of windows of 30 tabs each is enough to go into heavy swap.  The features I most use in Chrome are its element inspector (to strip out annoying page features) and its task manager (to kill off large tabs and free system memory).  Both indicate major failings of the browser concept.

Don't get me wrong:  instant access to content is nothing short of amazing (when the content is findable, accessible, and relevant).  Some curated sources do fairly well.  The New York Times for general news, my NPR affiliate for a generally good mix of news, information, and stimulating entertainment.  Both fall short on depth.

Wikipedia is good beyond belief.  Answering the attention economy, it has zero fucks to give for attention, and often captures it as a consequence far, far more effectively than any highly-engineered "sticky" page.  While it's clearly suited to, well, encyclopedic reference, it's also stunningly effective for developing, complex stories which are very poorly suited to the short-cycle looping coverage of broadcast, or even print media.  The Indonesian Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese tsunami, the Russian meteor.  

But the frustrations still persist, and so long as they do, my desktop will strongly resemble this image.


This is a repost of a February 27, 2013 reshare, see:
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/ff9HFxzCKzg
https://plus.google.com/+PaulMinda/posts/6ifhqrDYNWe