The new issue is out (subscribe!). I've just received my in-print copy, and tonight and tomorrow, en route to Colorado, I look forward to reading the 99% of the issue's contents I had heard about in the office but have not yet seen. Through the eons I've made a point of reading as much of the magazine as possible not in galley proofs nor in intermediate versions but the way civilians would, when it arrives all nicely bound and illustrated. More reaction anon.
The 1% I have seen is my article on that evergreen topic, information overload. The reporting for this one was fun, in that it involved talking with people whose ideas, software, writings, or any combination thereof have guided my thoughts about technology's limits and evolution.
They were: Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and creator of (among other things) the brilliant early program Lotus Agenda; Phil Libin, founder and CEO of Evernote; Esther Dyson, a friend since our teenage years and an authority on all things digital; David Allen, famous for the "Getting Things Done" approach to life and a friend since I met him in Texas ten years ago; and Mark Bernstein, chief scientist of Eastgate Systems and designer of Tinderbox, an elegant and powerful Mac-based system I've used for info-management since making the Mac switch six years ago. (For a decade before that, I relied—and still love—the Windows program Zoot, by Tom Davis of Zoot Software.) Among other distinctions, Allen and Bernstein are former guest-bloggers here.
You can see their predictions in the article. The point of this post is to mention its existence, and to cover a few update points:
1) I allude in the article to my version of the Holy Grail, "speaker-independent voice recognition." Here's the real-world example: I spent yesterday doing "American Futures" interviews in Winters, California, and this morning doing tech interviews in San Francisco. As a result, I have hours and hours of audio recordings, which eventually I need to sit and transcribe.
Someday, I will be able to feed those recordings into an automatic transcriber, and get nice typed-out versions on the other end. No system now extant comes close to working well enough to handle that challenge. Not Dragon's software, which does fine when you train it to your own voice, not the Google or Apple voice-recognition that can parse limited words and phrases. A timeline with the article says that this might work within 10 years. Many people have written in to say, No, it will happen sooner! I think they're wrong but hope they're right.
2) A version of the Holy Grail is a system that will automatically collect info from business cards and render it into usable, searchable text form. Phil Libin's Evernote has produced a hardware/software combo that is not perfect, but that unlike the voice systems has become just good enough at the task to be worthwhile from my point of view.