Your Own Personal Workstation

I have been grappling with the issue of designing fitting, comfortable, and effective personal information ecology since...forever. Certainly since the late 1980s. I have been through all the PIMs, the outliners, the groupware -- REXX-driven TSRs, OCR-driven text input with ZyIndexing, and the like. More recently I've been dealing with all the web-driven tools -- the blogs and Wiki and so forth; SharePoint and LAMP and so on. It's all been...vaguely dissatisfying. Why?
On one hand I am being harsh, and that harshness points at something that's missing. At the same time, I should be thrilled with what I have -- I do have a personal workstation. By using Google Desktop search, all the text, e-mail -- everything on my system is accessible. Through a "broadband" cable modem connection, I can link to practically any information source on a global basis, and have the server end generally be the constrained resource. But at the same time, as I think about what it would take to craft a more amenable access to point into a person information ecology, I encounter the modern malaise -- too many choices and not enough guidance.
Let's get consultative about this: First and foremost, what is the desired end-state? At the end of the day, what's the desire outcome -- what do you (I) want to have in hand? The first thought that occurs is that I want to be fed. And interesting analogy, and one that has certainly has been dwelled on and dealt with, certainly with the emergence of RSS. But as sophisticated and the web can be spun to feed things to me, and even with he possibility of applying collaborative filtering to my meta-feed stream, it's still a situation where I need to proactively interact with the random and variable information universe out there in a and associative-bordering-on-random fashion. I need to find, then bring back into my environment , some item of interest. Now that item of interest may provoke connection to others, but there is still a linearity; it isn't really "as we may think" because, I think, there is a lot more to how we think, and how we construct connection, than what can be modeled in a 2-d system.

I want a system that keeps all my concerns in a whole and complete fashion. This involves the element of design; I will always been upgrading, tweaking, recontextualizing, and reconnectiong all the various elements on a constant basis, but I want to, at the end of the day, feel confident that all my bases are covered. I don't see any way to get that now. In my mind I can invent some of the necessary, evolutionary pieces -- I think. But it’s hard. The design language isn't quite there. Right now, I feel constrained by the 2-dimensionality of current approaches. That's why I'm working on a 3-d approach that's built on the backbone of existing technologies, but which guides and evolves the user experience toward the world as it is evolving, rather than stuck in the 2-d world as it has been for the past 60 years

Actually I think I will work up a requirements document for the personal information ecology. This is progress.