Leaving Forrest Brady’s very cool, very eclectic IgniteSF event last night, Andie and I agreed that the most thought provoking presentation (admittedly, pregnant lady and I skipped out post Scubabot) was Brooke Blumenstein’s Web 2.0 Outside the Tech Scene.
Her partner Toby Segaran’s on datamining was also a kick, listen to both here. And I’m fascinated to see they’re experimenting with outsourcing their lives, since I’ve become enamored of the same idea after having the 4 hour workweek shoved down my throat by my friend Brian. I digress.
Setting aside the presentation form itself ( 15 slides, 5 minutes, which really keeps things moving along ), and Brooke’s nervousness ( a tip to a potentially otherwise great speaker: modulate your voice, and decide which part of you you’re going to let move, keep the rest still ), her talk about Katzenbach Partners Hub+ knowledge management system, which generates tags for saved documents, provoked an idea.

AG and I’ve both broken our heads against Burning Man’s extranet, which although well intentioned is a kludge, and so doesn’t inspire use. In fact, it actively discourages it. So coming to learn how to make one work was interesting.

But to the question: why can’t we embed publishing into the production platform itself? Why can’t Word or Excel or whatever have a button insterted into the menu bar that saves the document directly to the archiving architechture, automatically pulling key words from the title and headers, and suggesting tags, and suggesting which teams be allowed access?

It seems so simple to do, and of course I understand none of the technical implications. But given the amount of data increasing daily, why can’t we simplify the storage and retrieval of it just a wee bit?

I write a file which has the words “solar”, “gerlach,” and “DPW” in the title–surely that’s plenty to explain what teams of people aught to be interested in it, and where it should live? And from that, be able to infer and generate tags?

Like I said, I’m sure I’m missing something.