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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Monica's digital story   T A B L E__T A L K Is the under-construction space station just a high-flying pork barrel? State your opinion in Table Talk   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     ____________________ Technology news from Defining the limits of open source ____________________   R E C E N T L Y Gathering of the Linux tribes By Andrew Leonard Hackers and suits eye each other warily amid LinuxWorld hoopla (03/04/99) Molotovs and mailing lists By Austin Bunn When bomb-throwers target e-mail discussions, no one can escape the carnage (03/03/99) Terrors of the Amazon By Lev Grossman A writer journeys into the strange, savage land of his readers and finds himself performing unspeakable acts (03/02/99) In defense of day traders By Paul Kedrosky Don't blame them for Net-stock volatility. They're just doing their job: Making the market more efficient (03/01/99) Crips, Bloods in the Web 'hood By Greg Brouwer Are gang sites for real or for wannabes? (02/26/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

Personal information mismanagement Why hasn't the software industry given us more tools to get our lives in order? - - - - - - BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | I need a software program that works the way I do. If I said that in a TV commercial, my wish would be miraculously fulfilled. But the software industry hasn't yet answered my need. I've got all the programs I could ever want for writing, for browsing the Web, for crunching numbers, for moving files around. What I need is a product that can store, sort, retrieve and organize all the myriad bits of data that course through my typical day -- from the details of a contract with a writer to the notes from a phone conversation with a reader to the plans for a dinner with a friend. Of course, there are lots of programs available to help organize your life -- but most of them are hopelessly inflexible. Rather than adapting to your needs, they demand that you change your habits to fit their formats. Creating programs that "work the way you do" has long been a grail for the software industry. Yet, 20 years into the personal computer revolution, we are all still prisoners of the product categories that emerged in the industry's infancy. Want to structure your own information in your own unique way? You can figure out how to make it work in a spreadsheet, word processor or database, which is usually a square-peg-in-round-hole sort of operation; or if you've got the programming chops, you can build your own custom application. But if you're like most people, you get yourself a PIM -- which sounds like an old-fashioned drink but actually stands for "personal information management" program. The software industry has had as hard a time designing and marketing PIMs as it has naming them. Most of these programs take their cue from the granddaddy in the category, the old DOS program Sidekick: They offer calendars, address books and to-do lists. Today, programs like Lotus Organizer provide such functions -- sometimes, as with Microsoft Outlook, integrated with an e-mail program. Increasingly, people who like this approach use a PalmPilot to extend the reach of their PIM so that they can carry their information with them in their pockets. Finally, a new category of Web-based PIM services is trying to get people to transfer their PIM information onto the Net -- but, as Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg points out, the last thing you want to do is wait for a Web site connection just to jot a note on your calendar. The trouble with all these personal information managers is that none of them is truly personal. They all follow rigid structures that you can't adapt to your own uses. If you want to do much besides storing names, addresses and appointments, too bad. There is an alternative tradition in the software world of innovative, unique programs that offer creative takes on the problem of information management. These tools serve as flexible environments for data that you can organize and arrange according to your needs and whims, rather than some programmer's preconceived idea of how you should be working. They're not just for storing names and addresses -- they're for organizing research, grouping bits of related information and tracking details. Writers, obviously, love these programs, but they are potentially invaluable to anyone who works on a computer. Alas, the best offerings in this category have been discontinued, and those remaining are labors of love or products of shoestring operations unable to make noise in the crowded software marketplace. - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T_ P A G E .|. Getting organized -- a short guide to the PIM universe