PIM Workshop at CHI2008 – accepted papers

Accepted papers have been announced for the Personal Information Management workshop at CHI2008 in Florence.

Loads of good stuff (see full list of accepted papers), but here’s a few highlights which caught my eye:

• “Evaluating Personal Information Management Using an Activity Logs Enriched Desktop Dataset” (Sergey Chernov, Gianluca De martini, Eelco Herder, Michal Kopycki, Wolfgang Nejdl) – real-world evaluation is a key challenge for the PIM community. The very nature of personal information means its hard to get access, hence the need to construct data-sets of test corpora, similar to those used in the Information Retrieval community.
• ” From Novice to Expert: Personal Information Management Behaviors in Learning Contexts” (Deborah Barreau) – Deborah wrote one of the seminal early 90s papers on digital PIM so I look forward to hearing about what she’s working on now from the perspective of Educational IT.
• “ An Overview of Web-based Monitoring: Future Directions and Challenges” (Melanie Kellar) – Melanie, one of my colleagues at Google UX will be talking about her PhD work on online information seeking and associated management practices such as bookmarking.
• “Collaborative Personal Information Management With Shared, Interactive Tabletops” (Anthony Collins, Judy Kay) – I’m intrigued, dare I say it all sounds a bit oxymoronic ,”Collaborative personal” …?

See you there?

PIM as peformance art – list slammin’

Two list slams are happening next week in the SF Bay Area c/o Sasha Cagen:

• Tues., Jan. 8, 7:30 pm, Modern Times Books, 888 Valencia Street, San Francisco
• Thur., Jan. 10, 7 pm, Red Hill Books, 401 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco (upcoming)

I’m going to try and make the first, I’m intrigued to see how performance-y its going to be …

Personal information heath – 2 stories from the NY Times

Not one but two stories in this week’s Health section (yes, yes, I know I’m getting to that age when I don’t throw Health sections straight in the recycling bin!)

• A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves – Hoarding and too little organization can be bad for you. My favourite quote from this article, focused on the physical world, is “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?”. Suffering from chronic disorganization? The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization can help. Interestingly the article does not consider the opposite end of the spectrum – and the health issues connected with being over-organized.
• Giving Disorganized Boys the Tools for Success – Some parents are paying “organizational tutors” to help their kids organize their time and stuff. Commentary: When will kids start paying someone to help their parents manage their email?