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This isn't your ideal solution—as you've noted, DTP is currently OS X only—but it does work pretty well for me, especially when I'm thinking about a general topic and need to find information on it. I even wrote a post about the similarities between Joyce's method of composition / finding material and how Johnson uses DTP.

There is a OSX application specifically written for these kind of scenario's: DEVONthink. http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000231.html It has the Abby OCR engine built-in, a web server and an extremely smart search filter, which is able to find related documents based on metrics like keyword frequency.

when a child is exposed to them it is much harder for that child to form the same mental disciplines.

Books can communicate more worlds more quickly and in more detail than any screen-based media (movies, television, video games, etc.).

Your observation about reviews of unheard-of Independent bands isn't really relevant. Yes, this was a fairly long review, but the book is hardly unheard-of. Everything Bad is Good For You made it onto various best-seller lists, and is widely available. See the June 16, 2005, entry of the author's blog: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/arc hives/2005_06.html

If it is, I found his blog by searching for "steven johnson emergence", the phrase that he said in a Slate post was hidden in blogs and stores. And there he shows that most searches for "emergence" or "interface" don't return his books. Imagine that.

Actually the author (Steven Johnson) took all of his ideas from the book he wrote on the topic called Everything Bad is Good For You. He's a regular columnist who speaks and writes on these issues often.

The book extends his argument to include not only video games but many other forms of modern media as well. He argues that todays complex, multi-threaded tv dramas (The Sopranos, The West Wing, even Scrubs and Seinfeld) sharpen our social networking skills and enhance our ability to focus and collect information.

Its certainly worth a look, that is if you're not too busy playing video games.

What seems to be completely absent about this discussion is the fact that Apple developed this technology in the mid nineties. Dubbed V Twin. This technology was part of the failed attempt to bring Mac OS into the future, called Copland.

It's still very much alive, as is much that was developed as part of Copland. Today, it's called Apple Information Access Toolkit.

"Apple first showed Spotlight last June, and if you look at it you will see that it is really an extension of an old Copland technology (the project that was started to originally replace System 7.5) that came out in System 8.6 under the TwinTurbo codename (text summarizing and indexing of the hard drive)." TwinTurbo? I thought it was V-Twin. http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/arc hives/000179.html

But the Smart Folders idea goes back much deeper in Apple history -- in fact, it pre-dates Jobs' Second Coming. Smart Folders used to be called "Views" and they were a pre-announced feature of Copland, the ill-fated OS that was eventually replaced by the NeXT OS. (It drew on the V-Twin text indexing that did make it into OS 9, I believe, and may well still be a part of OS X.) I saw a demo of Views when I visited Apple in 1996, and it made such a strong impression that I wrote about it in my first book, Interface Culture:

Apple's V-Twin implementation lets you define the results of a search as a permanent element of the Mac desktop -- as durable and accessible as your disk icons and the sub-folders stacked beneath them. In Apple's language, these new items are called "Views," for reasons we will come to understand. At first glance, a View looks and behaves like your average folder or sub-directory: it is represented by an icon; clicking on that icon opens a window that contains other icons, representing assorted files; clicking on one of those icons opens the appropriate document. So far so good. Things get tricky, however, when we try to add a file to a View manually, by dragging an icon over the View's window... The user has only indirect control over the contents of a View. He or she specifies its general attributes, using the language of the V-Twin search engine: "find all documents on my hard drive that are likethis other document." The computer then decides which documents fulfill that request, and places them in the View window. (Technically speaking, it places copies -- or "aliases" -- of each document in the View; the originals remain in their previous locations.) Unlike the temporary results of a "find file" request, the View window has what programmers call "persistence."Like an ordinary folder, the View remains on your desktop until you throw it away. During that lifespan, the V-Twin software regularly updates the View's contents whenever new files arrive that match the original search request.

...http://stevenberlinjohnson.com flames you !

What a country!!

...about these Googleholes:

"I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray..."

http://stevenberlinjohnson.com

You too can participate in the roast by finding his e-mail address on Google.

Steven Johnson has some responses to a bit of the slashdot criticism of his article. They can be found here.

found here at the authors website:

Googleholes
I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray:

The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them.

Here's a more real-world example of the bias at work, which is equally self-reflexive: search on "steven johnson emergence." The top ten results are either from blogs, Amazon product pages, or the O'Reilly Network (very big with the open source and blogging communities.) Now, Emergence was reviewed by the NY Times, the Economist, the Village Voice, the UK Guardian, and dozens of other major publications with huge readerships. But Google doesn't think those results are as relevant as blogger reviews. Now, I'm a blogger, and I love the blogging community, so I think in a way that this is not necessarily bad news. But it's hard not to see it as a kind of bias.

While the point that more refined searches give you better results is true, that's not what the author's talking about. He's trying to tell you that Google is an aggregation of zeitgeist and how many links things have (link interdependence, which is Google's strength, also adds its own bias), and not necessarily their relevance to the 'real' world. An understanding of how Google might skew results is useful.

Here's his site: read the July 16th article. "You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important."

he says that he (surprise) got flamed for the article on Slate a few days ago (guess slashdot was slow in picking it up). Head over to his blog to see his response to many of the comments we're making about his inability to properly form search terms. He's also got a feedback section on there so we can flame him directly if we want.

I've pasted it below in case his blog gets /.ed:

"I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray:

The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them.

Here's a more real-world example of the bias at work, which is equally self-reflexive: search on "steven johnson emergence." The top ten results are either from blogs, Amazon product pages, or the O'Reilly Network (very big with the open source and blogging communities.) Now, Emergence was reviewed by the NY Times, the Economist, the Village Voice, the UK Guardian, and dozens of other major publications with huge readerships. But Google doesn't think those results are as relevant as blogger reviews. Now, I'm a blogger, and I love the blogging community, so I think in a way that this is not necessarily bad news. But it's hard not to see it as a kind of bias."