Smart Content Tracking.
Several years ago I picked up a device that plugged into my TV. It had a little antenna, and would receive a couple of weeks worth of TV schedules, news, sports scores, etc. It’s primary ‘job’ was to control the VCR, sort of a control head for a VCR that gave you an early version of Tivo. You still needed to use the VCR remote to watch recorded shows, but the remote did control your TV for you, allowing you to change channels, volume, etc.
As far as using the device to program a recording, you could use the interface to type show names, or use the schedule layout time horizontally, channels vertically, and use the directional buttons to scroll and select programs.
Obviously there is quite a bit more that the platform had, but all that said, the reason I bring it up at all is that it had a feature that I fell in love with, that I would love to see more of. After you ran the platform for a few days, or at worst a couple of weeks, it would figure out what channels you used the most, and it’s display would pull those channels to the top of the schedule. So if you primarily watched or recorded WGN, H&G TV, Discovery, TLC, TMC, and local 5, in that order, then rather than having to scroll through the entire list of channels where they may be randomly located, they would all appear at the top of the schedule, and you would be able to use the control head to rapidly change between the channels you like.
The closest I see at the moment is to manually re-arange your list of channels to the order you would like. Even there you are pretty much limited to what you think the order should be, and the collection of applications that support such re-ordering is rather limited. Problems with this include losing channels because you never looked through them before, and so you didn’t think that A&E had any interesting programing.
Tivo attempted to address the ‘lost channel’ syndrome by recording ‘suggested’ shows that their research suggested you might be interested in, based upon what others who liked the shows you like also enjoyed. Sometimes this works, but there are flaws with the implementation. For example suggested shows that were not watched would not be deleted before unwatched scheduled recordings were. At least that was my experience.
In any case, the movement of commonly used information to a convienent location is caching. You cache the winter coat next to the door in the winter, and file it in the basement closet in the summer, when you cache the light jacket and rain coat next to the door. You cache your car keys in the pocket of the jacket, with the keys to the house, and office, but file the keys to the storage locker on a key hook in the kitchen cabinet.
At the moment the closest we have to a automatic caching system on your pc is the ‘Documents’ start menu item. This works well for documents you store on your PC, or on mapped drives, but falls apart when you are working on documents that are stored within documents, or web pages and the like. If you like to have some music playing in the background, you may want your playlist in that ‘Documents’ item, but you probably don’t want to replace the entire list with the music your player is playing.
Your History function in your web browesr may have a ‘most viewed’ option available. However in any case the various ‘cache’ systems don’t interact with each other. Another place where you may see something like this is in the File menu of some applications, where the ‘most recent’ menu item lists some number of recent files you have worked with.
Obviously you can use something like Google Desktop to index a wide variety of content on your PC. However since the system likes to use your systems idle time to index content you have on your system, if most of the information you used is only available when you are logged in, perhaps as part of network mappings attached to your login, it’s usefulness is somewhat limited. Likewise if you have an Intranet within your company, it’s unlikely that the content available on the Intranet will be indexed, unless you browse all of that content for yourself.
There are also things like ‘intermitently’ accessed information. Perhaps once a quarter you process your employee’s income in preparing federal and state taxes. So you probably keep a link to the procedures or specific spreadsheet in one location or another. For a couple of days after you last used that information, it will appear on your start menu, but over time it will disappear. Wouldn’t it be better if the system would recognize that you were about to need that information again, and pre-cache the content for you. Sure you could set up a recurring calendar event with the appropriate links, but even that is reaching.
In any case there is a variety of useful methods of keeping track of what you are working on. Even with that, there are certain problems. For example I like reading. Sometimes that content is in e-books. Some of those are web pages, some are pdf files, etc. I have yet to find a good viewer for either that keeps track of where I am on a file. If I am reading a book (paper) I may place a bookmark at the page I am, when I put the book down. However ‘bookmarks’ in various applications have an entirely different contextual meaning.
No real answers here. Just some observations.
