Bookmarked Thoughtware by Paul Bricman

Paul Bricman’s ‘thoughtware’ tool Lexiscore, a nutritional label for food for thought, was mentioned in the Obsidian discord channel on knowledge management. His works seems of general interest to me, so I added his writings to my feed reader. I mailed him with two elements that are important in my information strategies that I don’t immediately see covered by his description. One is: In between individual subscriptions and engagement by the masses (likes, shares) to surface what others curate, there is the level of communities of practice and interest. Subscribing to multiple people within a community and doing so in many communities allows a focus on patterns in what people are talking about (what are Berlin coders ehthusiastic about these days, what’s going on in the [your fav topic here] scene in Argentina?), beyond just focusing on individual pieces of shared content. Two is that being able to see how other people differently describe (in tags e.g.) the same pieces of content that caught my attention, gives me a measure of distance to other groups unknown to me, yet with interesting overlap. They are interested in the same thing but use very different words and language to describe it, representing different view points which is valuable information (Surprise). This is how I used Delicious bookmarking when it still showed you how other people tagged the things I bookmarked as well, and who those other people were. Because tags are not just descriptors but also navigational way points.

My research is focused on extending human thinking with artificial ways of thinking. An important part of this venture is bringing to life actual tools which incorporate the artificial affordances I’m designing, and then taking them for a spin. I call this family of tools thoughtware

Paul Bricman