The everything box

Category: Technology

Published: 02/11/2009 10:37 a.m.

Gmail has changed the way I do email in two crucial ways. 1st is tagging. It's just like folders, but one email can be in multiple folders. For instance a message about creating an agenda can be in todo and meetings. Two tags, no folders, but I can see the tagged emails as if they were all in a folder together.

The second way is far more important. While tags are great, often times the text or data that a tag gives can be found within the message. So, by utilizing search, I can find the same message by searching for words inside the message. Or, I can search by date, subject, to/from, etc. Good search allows me to archive off everything after I have read it or acted on it. And thus, all my emails are transfered to an everything box. This everything box works because the search works. Without search, it would be the same as a junk drawer, which is does not make it easy to find things.

But, can the everything box work for, well, everything? Could I have a single folder on my computer called "stuff" where I saved everything? I don't think so. Even with fantastic search, I don't think this works. It doesn't work because it is missing the tagging. Tagging is pseudo-organization. It isn't very rigid. There are not a lot of rules. You can limit yourself to 4 tags or 400. What tagging really does is give something a keyword that it may not already have. In addition to this, it puts this keyword on a higher level. Tags give more relevance, which many search results are based on.

Currently, Google is experimenting with some very rudimentary tags. Their user-based yes/no system allows people that are logged in to rate a search result as good or bad. On a conceptual level, this gives that item a tag of the search terms. For instance, if you search "cheap flights", I would guess that Expedia would pop-up in the top results. As people (millions) who are logged in rate Expedia as a yes, that website gets a tag of "cheap flights" and a counter. The more ups it gets, the higher the counter goes. Or, if someone removes the search result, they could actually be removing a tag (or 5 tags at once). Essentially, Expedia gets a tag (cheap flights) and a score for that tag (positive or negative). The higher the score, the more 'relevant' that site is, and the higher it comes up when searching based on relevancy.

I imagine this doing some great pruning of link-bait sites from the Google indexes. But can this work for a desktop or a cloud computer? I still don't think so. As a single user, if I employ the same method, then my files are only going to get tags with a score of 1. That just reduces the field to 1's and 0's (how ironic). That isn't very helpful when I am looking for a presentation, especially if I vary my search terms a bit. Currently, even in searching though a folder of 100 files, I often need to search multiple variations of terms to find the file I am looking for. This doesn't bode well for an everything box.

Do you think the everything box would work? Are you using a similar type of setup? I would love to hear about it and maybe give it a go myself.