Each of us goes through a process of receiving and taking in information, digesting it and adding it together with other pieces of what we know, think, believe or wonder, and then we look for ways to transmit it out … to a colleague or a friend or a group or a network … via conversation or publishing something or leaving messages and other pointers to useful or potentially interesting information.

We all do it.  And to do it, we all locate, gather, store and remix all sorts of information.  And each of us do this in our own highly personalized way, which interacts a lot with how we think and how we feel our way through the information using a mouse, a keyboard and a screen

Each of us have our own customized version of locating information, copying it and pasting it somewhere, adding it to places where we packrat the information we are going to use (bookmarks, del.icio.us links or Furl links).  And, if we’re advanced users we may use some form of personal content management application and develop a personal knowledge work architecture and strategic business process.

But we don’t yet have an universally applicable, but extremely easy-to-use application that allows us to reshape our information processing habits into a smooth, flexible and versatile process.  The pencil and the ballpoint are such tools, but for an earlier, not-digital-and-electronic environment.  The pen, and eventually the ball-point pen, allowed great masses of people to start writing more and more easily, turning the process of expressing one’s thoughts, analyses, opinions and such into relatively trivial work (in the sense of taking ideas and information and turning them into material that was shareable, transmittable to other people for their consumption and use).

New tools and services are necessary to help people become more effective at functioning in the permanent white water of change and the ferocious, always-on flows of fresh information that characterize our information-saturated, increasingly Web-related lives.  The world of blogs is beginning to bring such tools and the issues of widespread usability – let’s call it blogcrafting - into the realm of individual authors, writers and knowledge workers.

Consider Qumana, for example … we want to turn the information that we take into new material that reflects what we think and/or believe,.  More often than not that involves gathering some pertinent information (via search or surfing or receiving incoming material that we have judged pertinent, and then applying uir thinking to that material

We re-mix .. or re-construct … information which we then pass on to our networks of collagues, customers or friends.  We do this with pen and paper when we’re in the cognitively more familiar environment we grew up with, and by sending them a brief note, our words with a link or a pointer to some additional information.

Qumana is a remixer .. a simple and easy-to-use application for assembling and reconstructing your thoughts as you are working in the ongoing flow of fresh information.  It’s design incorporates the drag n’ drop gesture, which cognitive scientists have concluded is a close mimicking of the body’s way of noticing and selecting something out of that ongoing flow of information.

From drag n’ drop to re-mixing and re-constructing … the content gathered by a user can be moved around, the author’s own words can be added, and additional content can be added or deleted with a click.

The user can also add keyword-based tags, either to support RSS feed and blog post aggregation or to initiate the use of granular keyword-driven advertising of any sort .. both functions which will find increasing usefulness where articles and other pieces of information are routinely posted to networks and become the newest bucket of bytes added to a never-ending, always churning flow of fresh information.

To become effective in these conditions of ongoing flow, a combination of easy and simple tools and the willingness to break old and perhaps laborious working habits   …. Copy this, go back to find that URL, which window was I in ?, open the blog’s editor, paste what I copied, switch windows, now where was I ?,  oh yeah, I want that too, copy, backtrack to the blog editor window, paste … all set, now write a couple of paragraphs …. Hey, can I move that picture to the other side … and so on.

Using Lektora and Qumana together offers a user an extremely streamlined and efficient process for staying focused and productive in the non-stop flow of information.  There’s a logical and smooth progression from input (both defined, customized input and the more unpredictable input derived from searching and surfing) through processing (the thinking and crafting of ideas and expression involved in creating and remixing content into a final blog post) to the publishing of the output .. to a blog post, as an email or saved to create a document of some sort.

Technorati Tags : Qumana, Blogcrafting, blogs, RSS