Today I read the thesis of Raphaël Mazoyer “I Am online: Presenting myself at work through a website”. And it gave me some useful clues in solving the mysteries of the personal portals. First of all since meeting online people is different from meeting people in real live. You have recreate the feeling of trust, one way of doing that is by transparency:

Reality as a proxy for the requested accuracy; subsequently, transparency as the natural way to convey reality to visitors; finally, the completeness implied by transparency.

So in order to create a real life feeling of trust, you need to be as open as possible. And what better way would there be than letting all the flows of your digital life come together in one stream of your homepage. In his aim to recreate reality he writes: “The assumption was that the reality of my person was bound to appear clearly to the visitors, if they were presented with all the activities I have during the course of a day.”

In order to recreate reality he writes: “Instinctively, memory seems an area where the computer can best extend” referring to the ideas of McLuhan that technology are extensions of the human, and the computer can be best used as an extension for the brain (memory). Later on he continues whit an investigation how the human brain works, and concludes with the idea than information can be best stored in 3 ways: The library (long term memory), Date (short term memory) and Thematic (where does it relate to) And to my surprise these where already the things i used in my weblog (or everyone uses)

Then in the second part of his thesis he quotes Breton “we are shown everything, and yet the essential seems to escape us.” And the impact of this quote still scares me.. This brings me back to one of my earlier questions: Chaos control, how to keep track of your personal information. Or perhaps rewritten as how to be able to see the essential from the everything.

A great example of the truth of Breton is perhaps Raphaëls current project page. And an article why William Gibson gave up blogging.

He (st: Gibson) collects and refines ideas over time, and has a gift for organizing his language to maximal effect. Put another way, he chooses his words carefully, and he chooses the contexts in which they will have most impact.

So The lesson for to day is how to distill the essential from the everything and the quality from the quantity. And apparently blogging is not the answer.