Over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann is rediscovering the wonderful Mac application that is DEVONthink Pro - DEVONthink: An appreciation of “smart groups”
I’ve now had DT Pro v. 1.1.1 in battlefield action for the last few weeks, and have been dutifully feeding it anything I find that seems tangentially interesting or useful; a few custom Quicksilver triggers mean one-click, no-look addition of any data type, from web pages to text selections to photos, full PDFs, and movie files.
DEVONthink Pro is probably my favourite piece of software. Ever. While I use a score of multimedia applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc.) on a regular basis, I am –by nature and trade, in the broadest sense– an information worker. I need a digital commonplace book to collect, track and act upon all those things that Merlin mentions, and much more. While DEVONthink Personal proved an excellent application for doing this, the introduction of DT Pro and its subsequent updates have left me continually astounded. (See my earlier detailed review of DT for more information.)
Merlin goes on to mention the “smart groups” –basically, agents to collect items automatically based upon their content or properties– but I’ve always found that its real power starts to show with things like concordance (estimations of related items — see Berlin’s article), offline archiving of web pages (very useful for changing sites like the NYT), sheets and records (think about a database), Dashboard widgets for quick access, and a teeming horde of AppleScripts. Those starting off with the software might not appreciate all these functions, but I can assure you that they all come in very handy, very soon. And the fact that DT/Pro gets “smarter” as you feed more information into it translates into a more powerful application every day.
Those needing to dig up knowledge on a constant basis can take the application a step further, though: I’m just now exploring DEVONagent, an “intelligent research assistant.” For a long while, I resisted: I’m definitely a Google power-user, and it seemed to do everything I needed it to do. Or so I thought. It turns out that DA has increased my research abilities many-fold. It scours not only the web in general, but also specific online databases to collect and collate information, compiling a useful text-only preview of all those tidbits it thinks I might like to know. With one click I can view the full pages in an integrated (tabbed) browser, or add the information into DTP. The new version also adds an interesting “visualiser” to see how other words and topics relate to your current item. The application takes a little getting used to, but it really pays off after a week or two.
So much information, so little time. At least with the DEVON gear, I can generally make the most of it.
May 23rd, 2006
A particularly lucid comment left by eletherious on my post “So you wanna start a blog?” has me thinking of a suitable response:
However, what you do not answer is why would someone blog rather than create a web site? Both requre the same focus and discipline over focus and content. It would seem that a web site provides more content and design flexibility whereas a blog is more one dimensional - literary / literal?
In the nearly fourteen years I’ve been producing both static and dynamic websites (oh, that makes me feel so old), this is a question with which I’ve grappled time and again. In fact, in the early days of blogs, when they were driven almost exclusively as vanity projects, I was one among many who resisted the creation of any product that stood simply as a monumount to one’s ego, perferring instead to produce a non-blog site that might showcase my writing, my artwork, my web design skills, and so on.
Do you see a difference between the two, as fundamentally ego-driven projects? In retrospect, I can’t. But I think this is due to a certain levelling of the stigma attached to both types of sites, and especially blogs. They aren’t simply vanity projects any longer, but also vital sources of ideas and information, and –ironically– a personal “static” website is more likely to be viewed with an air of hoity-toitiness (to use a technical term). After all, many static sites beg us to come back often and check for updates. Why should we? They rarely make those updates easy to find. Are we expected to troll through every page looking for something new every week? Isn’t that presumptuous, in a way? What could bring us back so regularly?
And therein lies part of the appeal of blog sites to visitors. In our busy schedules, we want the convenience of one-stop shopping. The days of visiting eight markets in one day is best left to the idle rich, or the very devoted traditional housekeeper inspecting the morning wares in a rural village. Most of us don’t have the time or the absolute need to wander through hundreds of sites of potential interest per day. I want to know what information is new, and I want to expend a minimum of effort finding it. Hence, of course, the rapid proliferation of newsfeed readers like Bloglines.
“But,” some will interject here, “there are applications that tell you when a page has been updated.” True. But of all the 60+% of people using Internet Explorer, what percentage of people have ever used the “Subscribe” function, or even know it’s there? I dimly recall using it a couple of times, and gave it up when it proved completely unreliable (due mainly to the way that information tends be moved around a website dynamically).
If your goal, then, is to attract and keep regular visitors –as opposed to people tripping across a popular page in your site via a search engine and, then satisfied, leaving forever– the reverse-chronological nature of blogs can be far more effective than the vast majority of static sites.
Beyond this, though, blogs have other advantages. As silly as this may sound, since the general expectations afforded to blogs are lower –after all, the ease of creating a blog has allowed everyone and their dogs to erect them as testiments to their own boredom– there is far less of an intimidation factor in actually getting the darn things up and running. For example, I can’t count the number of iterations of my own personal sites that have been nearly complete, but –in my final but overly-critical evaluations– weren’t “good enough” to be released. A showcase site (as was my intention) becomes a grandiose and complicated affair that, to perfectionist standards, may never be complete enough to launch. I had no such compunctions about creating and launching a blog, since I knew it would be quite easy to match up to the majority of sites out there. I could thus build up better material over time without fear, or at least without an incredible amount of pre-launch effort.
This all being said, eletherious does have an excellent point about the one-dimensionality of blogs. For example, most blogs can be seen as a simple stream of quickly-written and barely literate verbage spewing forth at regular intervals, eventually to “scroll off” the main page and disappear forever into the rarely-viewed archives.
But –and I stress the following– that doesn’t need to be so. Many of the better blog engines will allow you to easily create so-called static pages, or fixed pages, that will allow you to write materials accessible via a top or side menu. For example, a company may have pages about its history, its reputation, its clients, its products, and so on, and these can be viewed by all visitors at a moment’s notice. The “blog” portion can then be the news about launches, specials, reports, industry news, and those other tasty little morsels that encourage repeat visitors. This can provide the best of both worlds.
There are, of course, downsides to using a blog as opposed to a static site. For one thing, there is a constant pressure to update it; when your most recent post is eight months old, it shows a certain neglect. Blogs are based around “templates” –a standard look and feel you create for almost every page– which tends to limit the aesthetic variety within your site. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.) Since items are archived (unless deleted), all the older posts on the site are there to reflect upon you –the chaff with the wheat, so to speak– and so those people producing wildly inconsistent material, or who change their minds often, may not wish visitors to see those pieces. And, although providing the ability for readers to comment is often considered integral to building up a sense of loyalty and community (read: repeat visitors), the need to guard against undesirable feedback, mainly the spam that results from one’s popularity, has to be assigned a high priority.
The most important function of a static site, in my opinion, is a “point of presence”. In other words, a site that can be put up and left for indeterminate amounts of time that simply establishes your presence on the Net — and therefore in the world, such is the pervasiveness of the medium. If you’re a small business, or a scholar wishing to put up a few papers, or a proud papa or mama who just wants to put up a few baby pictures for family, then this could be perfect. Otherwise, it might be worthwhile to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using a blog engine to create your site, even though you may hesitate to consider the resulting product a blog.
No doubt many books have already been written about this topic, and many more will come. These are just a few idle thoughts conjured up this Sunday morning over a Thermos of coffee, though most of them are born out of long-standing practical experience, rather than ethereal theory. The latter, I’ll leave for the pundits to debate over their $8 mocha latte grandes. 
May 7th, 2006
