i think it’s difficult to think about things holistically with all the horizontal scrolling, but that’s a price to pay, i guess?

I tend to do this often.

I’ll create a new space and make a bunch of notes.

The title of the space reflects the topic family I want to write notes about, but then I’ll start to lose that focus in the interest of creativity.

So how is a visitor supposed to make sense of it all?

Well, i have an “index” that automatically builds of all the note titles. That index is the spacename menu, aka “notes menu”. It’s the menu that reads “TOO MUCH INFORMATION” right now on the top of this space.

That’s the only place that a list of notes appears right now. Additionally, it is not dynamic like the space itself – it doesn’t auto-refresh when you create new notes so you have a dynamic list.

There should be a dynamic list of all the notes on a space.

This list should be easy to find and always at hand while you’re on a space.

This list should be a preferred way to navigate a space.

• Information is no longer simply a necessity; it is now thought of as entertainment.
  • This opens the door to information clutter
• More and more ways of creating information are becoming available to more and more people.
• Complicated concepts are hard to communicate.
• Many issues trigger a cacaphony of opinions from all corners.
• Opinion masquerades as news or fact.
• We aren’t hunting for information so much as the information comes hunting for us.
  • This is how marketing works but this behavior has insinuated itself into all kinds of content.
  • In fact, creating information may not be enough without providing tools for the creator to market the information created.
  • However, the good information may be less extroverted than the bad information (marketing junk).
• Search and tagging tools are not good enough.

But people might not see the panel.

It should be more persistent than a panel.

It should almost be like the PBWiki sidebar.

But then again, the panel paradigm WORKS.

But only if you’re used to it.

METANOTES was conceived as this place.

When you find information with which you want to form some kind of relationship, METANOTES is a good place to put it.

But not until it’s super easy to find once you’ve got it in there.

We will have a search functionality sometime soon. This will help you find things in your big pile of stuff.

but what about making sense of a cluttered space?

• view as a spreadsheet
  • subject/body/date/creator
• view as a blog
• view as a pseudopoint
  • a div which turns each note into a “slide”
• these will help because complicated pages are just LONG, not innately evil.

There is TOO MUCH INFORMATION already.

is there? maybe the problem is that it’s too much UNNECESSARY information.

Humanity will be creating more and more information as time goes on.

MetaNotes is an information creation and distribution tool.

Therefore MetaNotes must be designed with ways to cope with too much information.

Orwell got it wrong. Orwell believed that, in the future information would need to be suppressed to control a society. Ray Bradbury had a slightly more accurate view of how things would hypothetically work. In the book Fahrenheit 451, the writer spoke through the Chief character explaining that excessive summarization allowed information to become eventually surpressed.
Shakespeare became annotated by hotshot writers that wanted to put their own footnote and interpretations in history. Eventually the works of Shakespeare were replaced with “One column, two sentences, a headline!” [Bradbury] Imagine a future where entire genres become genocided into a one-liner!
Eventually the one liners get ascribed to things such as the appearance of Paris Hilton’s shoes, the ones she wore publicly at the 2005 Oscars and therefore will never be worn ever again. Flava Flav’s teeth shine like… (insert genius poet’s life work into a metaphor here).
All information perceived to be of substance or resulting from deep thought/research gets washed out, homogenized into works of derivative nature. Forget the classics, wiping the dust off is too much work.

I’ve been out of college too long and haven’t had to write much substance in a while.