Written by Malcolm Ryder
Productive content is a major focus of eXie users.
Getting content and putting it away both get a lot of attention from users who need the content to support their ongoing work. Yet the full re-usability of the content is often frustrated by the inability to efficiently find it when needed. This probably reflects a need for the applied tools to be about the user first and about the content second.
Written by Malcolm Ryder
The difference between private and public is so easy for us to understand that when we hear “publicity” we already know whether we want it or not.
It’s a simple representation of how we feel — about choosing whether to expose things about ourselves or not.
Our sense of having very consistent feelings doesn’t change as we move from one environment to another, but our choice certainly differs depending on what is involved. We might think of “publicity” as being more or less widespread and somewhat unrestrained. Unless we try to control it, it may seem to be indifferent to who gets the exposure and access.
If we flip it around, however, the question is whether we want other people to ask us about ourselves or ask us to share something that we have.
The “feeling” that lies behind what they ask for can always be seen as having three elements: a level of interest, a privilege of access, and a degree of immediate intention.
That’s where we make a difference in a planned way. The more that we decide to satisfy their concerns by using our content, the more we are adopting a publishing role. In the entirety of our own collection of content, we have the option to aim distribution of the items in many ways. Some of our items have been produced specifically to be published, and others less so. But once we decide how someone else should be able to use any item in our collection, we can carry through as a publisher.
To some extent, everyone publishes their own content — to themselves. This just acknowledges that our own future use of something we saved beforehand will likely involve the same three elements of desire that any other requester has. Seeing things that way, the big question is, did we save things in a way that best serves the chance to publish?
Written by Malcolm Ryder
Part One: The Big Switch
2014 included an important milestone: internet users resoundingly showed their acceptance of file storage in the cloud despite absolutely huge threat events that we thought might put the brakes on.
Naturally, the 2013 Snowden leak of government data was the most dramatic — but also the most unlikely. Breaching a security agency makes everything seem less protected. But how many of us have the skills and opportunity to tunnel through that much security or even see a tunnel? Therefore, when you think about it, what are the chances that we are exposed to many such people at all?
Nonetheless, the fact that it happened and was not just a movie script made everyone sit up straight and think about things. And by the way, the scary part is that one person like Snowden could reach millions of other people; it doesn’t take very many experts to reach all of us.
Much closer to home, anyway, had been the earlier, incredible 2012 breach of journalist Matt Honan’s numerous “chained” online accounts involving Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Google, a horror story told in detail through Wired Magazine. Is there someone who does not use Apple, Amazon, Twitter OR Google? And the number of people who don’t use three of the four may be an even smaller number than the number of Snowden-level experts.
But also in 2013, Evernote had bad news for 50 million users when it was hacked. This was a different spin on things than was the alarming number of breaches of proprietary corporate systems, but after all, no Evernote “customer” controls Evernote’s security any more than Target’s or, now, SONY’s customers control those repositories and networks.
Ironically, even with the above “dark clouds” hanging over us, the fragility and cost of our own habits in sorting, organizing and saving information turns out to make online data storage better to have than to not have. We’ve looked at ourselves and decided which pain we would rather keep and which one to escape.
Now the matter is more about the ups and downs of what pain reliever to take. The problem with pain relievers is that great ones may require a prescription so they’re difficult to freely share, and mixing different ones is often a big No No for one reason or another.
However, those issues have hardly held anyone back.
So, the good news is that you can pretty much count on lots of things that matter to someone being in cloud storage instead of on a scrambled, failed, lost, stolen, or proprietary device.
Jump to Part Two: Intelligent Access
Written by Malcolm Ryder
Your Content: Make what you’re going to use, easier to haveIt’s safe to say that, more and more, any content collection is both digitized and likely to be kept online. Those are two great practical improvements over the past.
And, because digitized things easily get copied, modified and moved all the time, better content is more likely to somehow become available to whoever demands it.
But those changes can also have the effect of “letting all the cats loose in the yard”… That makes it more important for providers to proactively communicate where the provider’s preferred versions of content are going to be accessible.
Then, any time the provider’s preferences match the audience’s there is something worth protecting. So we want to not just save content, but we really want to manage it, just like we manage money instead of only putting it away where we keep it and spending it away.
If you are a content Provider, your catalogs become the portfolios that you share with your audience and that become their preference. Your audience can also give you better feedback on what is missing or should be better, and trust you to put those improvements where they already know to look.
But, we don’t want to make and distribute a separate copy of everything for each user; that would give us an unreasonable burden as a supplier. Instead, just like with broadcasting, we want to give many users access to the same ”best” copy, wherever it is; and if the location of the item changes, we just give all users access to the same new location.
And by the way, at any given time or place in the future, the main audience of your content collection might be… You.
When you subscribe and sign into eXie, you’ll see templates to borrow or make that will help you quickly get going with the eXie approach. Each template is a simple framework that looks like a table (called a “frame”), labelled with key words that identify (in columns) the type of ideas that an audience seeks out and (in rows) the ways that the audience is interested in those ideas.
Using the frame, you link the locations of online content to the type of idea and type of interest that is most relevant to the intended audience. Drag or copy the content links to the right places in the frame to create a catalog of the content; name the catalog; then publish the catalog online to general or selected audiences. Multiple different catalogs can be created for the same collection of content.
People who sign into an eXie user group or who receive an eXie notification will be able to access the catalog and can click any link in the catalog to access the chosen content on line.
There is nothing to install; the catalogs are available 24×7 on the web through PCs, tablets or smartphones; and the provider does not have to worry about moving or duplicating the content since the catalog points to wherever it already exists online without changing it. Existing security that protects your content, which you have already set up outside of eXie, remains as is.
With eXie, content collectors can quickly organize the content access for maximum value in one or more catalogs; add, remove, show, hide, update and distribute the catalogs themselves at any time with no special skills required.
