I am a great advocate of the cloud as a way to share, and a way to store.
I have for many years been drawn to the concept of folksonomies – organising knowledge by tags (with knowledge as a pile of leaves—as opposed to taxonomies (knowledge as leaves arrayed on specific branches sorted by traditional classification).
I would always argue for open and shared creation of documents and files, rather than closed and private. Collaboration. Informal. Shared. Cooperation. As a child of the sixties it all makes perfect sense, man.
But now I have the practical reality of using Google Docs and the cloud every day. I should feel at home, confident, and at ease. I am, however, conflicted, discombobulated even, and I have been trying to think of a metaphor that sums it all up.
In many ways it’s like making the huge shift from storing all your own clothes in your own drawers and cupboards in your own way, sorted in a manner that makes perfect sense to you, (my wardrobe is black on the left, white on the right, grey in the middle), to sharing your clothes in one huge bedroom or closet with 100 other people.
I can find any item of clothes in my own room in an instant. No problem. In the dark. Half asleep. Socks: top drawer, paired, all black. Tee shirts: third drawer down – just grab one. No problem.
With 100 people sharing my storage area, getting dressed can be a real worry. People are constantly moving clothes to different drawers—throwing them out when I expect them to stay there forever, adding a constant flow of new clothes in a big pile; items of clothes are never named, so I don’t really know what I’m looking at; people are renaming clothes just when I know where they are—it drives me crazy. And then (pushing the cloud and Google Docs as communal clothes storage metaphor further), when the Internet is not available to me, there is no access to my clothes at all. I am left with few options: going back to bed, resorting to old items—yesterday’s clothes from the laundry—or going shopping.
Judging from the Google Doc forums I am not alone. Collections missing, new clothes don’t show up in the right drawer, strange items of clothing turn up with me as the owner, my clothes have disappeared, and so on. Good to know I am not the only one struggling with this problem.
For assistance and ideas on how to use Google Docs, I suggest you add the Google Docs blog to your reader. If you want to keep your drawers tidy, that’s over to you.
Jedd Bartlett
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Nice metaphor! I work in two different 'Google Apps' workplaces and the confusion of all of those docs can be pretty overwhelming at times! I've even set up the Google 'collections' organisation for one of them and can be one of the worst at filing them properly when I am a champion when dealing with my own files on my computer. Lost in docs is a common problem of mine. Thankfully, the search is pretty good :-)
Completely relate to this, Jedd.
My solution has involved the equivalent of buying multiple pairs of black socks so I can always find a pair. In other words, I duplicate key docs, by organising them (right click on doc titles) in multiple folders. One folder might be shared, but another is mine, all mine, and not for sharing.
Have I shared enough dirty washing in pubic there?!;-)
Nice tip Karen, thanks.
And then there's the pair you keep at home for when you can't get to the cloud – and the one in dropbox, now which one is the most current? Let me see…
Hey man – groovy post ;-)
If there was a tshirt with "I love google docs… " on, I would wear it!
Couldn't really relate though as the use of collections (folders for those who are new to gdocs) / starring (used when I'm currently working on a doc so I can find them quickly) / the hide function (feels like I'm the only on the planet who knows about this – basically, it enables you to tidy up your 'home' view by selecting a document and go up to 'more'… option in there) etc… all means I only share 'clothes' (documents) when I need to, only have the 'wardrobe' stocked with the things I need and if all else fails I have a great butler (the search) to source the missing socks for me…
Hey DK – as with all fancy software it's the shortcuts and special tricks that make it work for us. Thanks for the tips.
Next step is figuring out how to stop owners throwing away my favourite pair of old shoes – deleting last year's docs that I want to go back and use again. It's not as though we're going to run out of space :-)
Great analogies… as a parent, I quickly discovered the need to 'model' to kids how we look for our belonging when we lose them, so thay have some strategies for finding their rugby shorts or favourite T shirt when ithey're not where they're expected to be..so thanks for the link…timely!