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09 Jun 2006
MicroContent cloud
When doing my presentation on MicroContent usage and management, I realised that Thomas Vanderwal's infocloud maps well on how I describes the various Lists with a MicroContent Client.
In a MicroContent Client you see various Lists popping up:
- Local Lists - these are lists like the library and any pre-programmed or user-defined List;
- Connected Lists - these are connected devices in the broadest sense of the word, such as a CD that is my computer or an iPod that is connected;
- Shared Lists - these are lists that can be found on the local network. That can be music of colleagues, images on other families computers or music of people in the audience;
- Remote Lists - these are lists that are found on the Internet, such as feeds or the MusicStore;
This seems to map reasonably well on the infocloud. However what I present here is a technical viewpoint, it shows how we use various devices. It is the way we are familiar with the world. The infocloud shows that there is another viewpoint or axis as well. I would like to call it the 'degree of closeness'.
The personal infocloud would then map on Local and Connected Lists. But if we have multiple computers or a music library in our network, we are talking about Shared Lists, but which are personal. And one should include this to Remote Lists as well. If I have a wishlist on amazon, create other MicroContent on Internet and pull that in via RSS, I should talk about the personal cloud as well.
One can see something similar with the local infocloud. If I understand Vanderwel's definition well, then I should talk here about resources that I know, people I know. One can find these back in Shared Lists, when we accidentally connect on a local network. These are the RSS-feeds that I explicitly add to my feedreader. I wonder whether I should add the feeds that I get from my newspaper and television station should be in here as well. Those two are familiar to me, so are in a sense local. Also Apple's MusicStore will fall in this category.
The global infocloud then maps on my Remote Lists. We are talking here about resources that I do not know (yet). Any search that I do will fall in this category. However the fact that I know Google or Pubsub to do search, makes them familiar and might be part of my local infocloud;
Another way to defined the personal, local and global is the familiarity with the MicroContent Items. In the personal cloud I know the Items that are there. In the local cloud, I know the lists, but I am as yet unaware of the items they contain. And in the global cloud I do not even know the lists.