Software development industry analysis by Larry O'Brien, the former editor of Software Development and Computer Language
Sunday, April 18, 2004

Chris Pratley asked for feedback on how blogging from OneNote should appear and my comments became too unwieldy for his comments box:

To dispense with two crucial things: ink support and layout support (i.e., not just tables but the arbitrary positioning of elements in X-Y space a la "real" OneNote). AFAIK, there is no blogging tool right now that allows you to draw a map and type "Bob's House" at the appropriate spot; for all the power of Blogging As It Exists, it basically works with text streams.

Now for the more ruminative stuff: OneNote has the metaphor of pages, tabs, and notebooks. The obvious mapping is to blog entries, categories, and blogs. So I would expect that to "subscribe to a blog" in OneNote, I would get a new notebook that periodically updated itself; new titled pages appearing for every new post. Since page titles have limited screen real-estate, this introduces a navigation problem: perhaps one needs some kind of automatic Table of Contents page, essentially providing aggregator services. Or... maybe one doesn't subscribe to a blog in OneNote, perhaps aggregation is the role of NewsGator / Outlook and a OneNote "subscribed to" blog represents posts that one wishes to keep around for reference: one still would have a OneNote notebook corresponding to the blog, but the notebook wouldn't update itself, one would use a SideNote / Snippet sort of capability to shoot entries from the aggregator into the notebook.

So upstream you must support ink and layout, downstream you must support the blog -> category -> entry hierarchy. The third leg of the stool is clearly linking. The feedlink / permalink distinction is the clearest example I know of REST: the feedlink is a permanent resource of "the latest stuff" the permalink is a permanent resource to "this particular thing." I want hyperlinks in OneNote that embrace this distinction and I want those hyperlinks to be able to navigate not only across the World Wide Web (of course) but within my own computer, workgroup, corporation, and social networks. In other words, I want OneNote notebooks to become transparent to deep linking: onenote://machinename/mynotebook/mypage#myanchor as a URI (short of onenote as a complete scheme, I'll settle for a transition period where http is shoehorned into service). Creating good RESTian links must be reduced to a trivial service (with my Tablet I want to be able to circle some elements, make a gesture, and those elements become a post, with a permalink and a reference in the feedlink). 

I also want to make a slightly different gesture to free the elements for editing. In other words, the "square" gesture makes a post that only I can edit (a traditional blog entry), the "star" gesture makes a post that anyone can edit (a wiki-like entry), the "circle" gesture makes a post that only people in the "ninja" group can edit, etc.

Sunday, April 18, 2004 1:08:55 AM (Hawaiian Standard Time, UTC-10:00) |  Disqus link  | Knowing#
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