Rome in 2 days? Sounds like a rush … however, the news is it can be done. And you needn’t spend all day “gladiating” tourist hordes in the Colliseum.

Neighbourhoods with fewer tourists:

• Trastavere “west of the river” (Google Maps)
• Around Via Serpenti (south from Via Nazionale) and Via Baccina (east of the Forum). My favourite cafe, La Bottega del Caffe, is at the intersection (Google Maps)

Cafes/restaurants:

• La Bottega del Caffe, Piazza Madonna (where Via Baccina and Via Serpenti meet, the nytimes appear to like it too)
• Cafe Baretto on Via del Boschetto (parallel to Via Serpenti)
• Cul de Sac near the Pantheon
• Cafes at Piazza Santa Maria in Trastavere

Cafe scene

Hikes and hills

• The seven hills are very central, easy to saunter between, and hence fairly busy (just print out a map before you go since maps are rare on the ground, and incredibly they are not all marked on tourist maps).

• Also, we found 2 really pleasurable hikes up above the urbanity. Firstly, the ridge to the west of the central city - Monte Giancolo from Trastavere to the Vatican (the last bit is in an incredibly surreal subway, access via the underground car park. Secondly, the ridge to the east, just head north from the top of the Spanish Steps (the further you go, the quieter it gets).

View from Giancolo hill

Place to stay

• The Beehive, an absolute oasis close to Rome Terminus station.

The touristy but absolute must do’s (take a deep breath, and alternate with a hike)

• The Roman Forum and Palatine Hill (simply stunning). Make sure you get the view of the Circus Maximus (which is otherwise not worth going closer to since its a scrubby dog park). Buy a combo ticket for Forum + Colloseum.
• The Colloseum (combo ticket with the Forum, but buy from the Forum for a shorter line).
• Views from the Capitoline Hill
• The Pantheon
• The Vatican complete with bizarreness effigies of women in childbirth around the main altar (you’ve got to give it to the catholics, they really do bizarre well)
• For even more bizarre, go the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione (I won’t say any more except that I absolutely guarantee you won’t be disappointed)

The quietest photo ever taken of the Vatican from St. Peters Square (seriously)

The travelators in the bowels of the Vatican (where the nuns go on the run?)

The quietest photo ever taken on the Spanish Steps (seriously)

Guide book and maps

• One thing to watch is the poor quality of maps and signage through Rome. I really recommend Lonely Planet’s Best of Rome (please buy from your local bookstore, not from Gigantazon). It actually manages to meet the claim on its front cover “the ultimate pocket guide and map” - it truly is portable unlike some of its thicker cousins, and has the best map I saw.

I’d often wondered about the accessibility of Mount Sutro (207m), one of the 7 hills of San Francisco. Seen from afar, it looked enticing - thickly wooded slopes rising up in the middle of the city. However, on maps it always tended to be marked “UCSF” so I assumed it was private university land.

I was really happy when a friend told me there were paths up there, and sure enough, there are lots thanks to the folk at Nature in the City who have been clearing paths (volunteer details here). We hiked up there on a Sunday in June and didn’t meet a soul in the lush Eucalyptus woods.

The only downside is the lack of view from the top. Those Eucalyptus trees are just too tall. But its still well worth the trip.

• Trail Map (pdf)
  
• Google Maps (with contours)

And another one! Books on PIM are just like London buses!

“Keeping Found Things Found” is by William Jones at UW (where does he find the time? ;-), and shares its title with the research group where he works. I’m working my way through this one, so more details soon.

In the meantime: 

• Link to buy at Amazon (Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management (Interactive Technologies) but don’t forget about your local bookstore.

   Well, all of a sudden, there’s a lot of books on Personal Information Management. William Jones at UW has been particularly productive! The first book is called “Personal  Information Management”,  and is an collection of papers by many of the top researchers in the field, edited by William Jones (UW) and Jaime Teevan (MSR). Many of the papers were the result of the PIM 2006 workshop in Seattle, and are grouped into four main sections:

1. Studies of PIM behaviour
2. New technology - Email! search! structure! I’m particularly excited to see Diane Kelly and Jaime Teevan’s chapter on evaluation. Cool technology is one thing, seeing if it can be used, let alone helps the user, is quite another!
3. PIM and the individual - The 2 chapters highlight individual differences between users, and how the management of personal health information is an important PIM domain.
4. PIM and group information management

Full TOC below. You can buy from Amazon (Personal Information Management) or go support your friendly local bookstore … !  TOC 1. Introduction

Part I. Understanding Personal Information Management2. How People Find Personal Information

3. How People Keep and Organize Personal Information

4. How People Manage Information over a Lifetime

5. Naturalistic Approaches for Understanding PIM

Part II. Solutions for Personal Information Management 6. Save Everything: Supporting Human Memory with a Personal Digital Lifetime Store

7. Structure Everything

8. Unify Everything: It’s All the Same to Me

9. Search Everything

10. Everything through Email

11. Understanding What Works: Evaluating PIM Tools

Part III. PIM and the Individual  12. Individual Differences

13. Personal Health Information Management

Part IV. PIM and Other People 14. Group Information Management

15. Management of Personal Information Disclosure: The Interdependence of Privacy, Security, and Trust

16. Privacy and Public Records

17. Conclusion William Jones (University of Washington), Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research)

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?

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 …

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?

Sasha Cagen, a near-neighbour of mine in San Francisco, has published a book all about to-do lists - To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us.

One of my complaints about HCI research into PIM is that it focuses on the organization and dis-organization of scientist, engineer, and business-y types. In contrast, “To-do list” is refreshingly real world. The book is itself a list - a list of to-do lists from all aspects of life - new years resolutions, lists you make whilst bored at work, relationships, shopping and more. All the lists were sent to Sasha’s To-do list magazine and blog, and each comes with a background story from the original list author, and a related “DIY list idea” from Sasha.

I couldn’t resist a list of some of my favourites:

• A recovering list obsessive
• Contacting God
• Lofty goals
• The list that won’t die
• A list in code

Get yourself a copy to balance out your PIM bookshelf!

If you find yourself in Kyoto and want to escape the hubbub, I recommend a climb up Mount Daimon-ji, famous because of the large kanji symbol (literally meaning “big”) carved on the hillside. You can see it huge from the centre of town, look on the hillsides to the northeast.

For such a beautiful nearby hike its surpisingly hard to find. Here’s what you do

• Travel to Ginkankuji, “The Silver Temple”, in the northeastern outskirts of Kyoto. There are plenty of buses from Karawamachi station.
• Facing the temple entrance, head down the street to the left, and take the first right before you go through the stone gate. Note there’s no need to pay the 500yen entrance to the table.
• Start heading up the valley, past the car park. The path splits a couple of times, take the branch each time with the most “footpath-looking” signs!
• After 30 mins you arrive at a small shrine at the centre point of the kanji, and you will be rewarded - if its clear - with a beautiful sweeping view over Kyoto, all the way down to Osaka to the south and the hills of Kurama to the north.
• The kanji turns out to be made up of a system of concrete bonfires which are lit for festivals.
• You can climb up further to the summit of the mountain through lovely forest (another 20 minutes each way - 466m). The path continues east from the summit. Watch out for snakes! I walked 200 or so metres further and saw the biggest snake I’ve ever seen slithering into the buses. Admittedly I haven’t seen that many snakes, but I was glad I had my trusty walking stick!

Here are some more pics:

Its not every day that PIM makes it into the hallowed pages of the New Yorker. Well, May 28’s New Yorker has an interview with Gordon Bell of MyLifeBits fame - a “lifelogging” project which is archiving a stream of his life experiences - well that much which is currently digitisable:

• Photos (58000 and counting, thats nearly as much as some of my more prolific Flickr contacts). For this he uses a “SenseCam”, a device he wears round his neck which uses infrared to detect people and scene changes which it promptly takes a photo of.
• Phone conversations (I wonder if he plays a “this conversation may be recorded for life archiving purposes” when calling data centres)
• Window management on his desktop - e.g. opening and closing applications
• “Ephemera” such as wine bottle labels.

Although the article has little new in the way of technology - it does have a few interesting anecdotes:

• Bell cites 3 major “eiphanies” in starting MyLifeBits - (1) Raj Reddy’s late-90s book digitization project made him realise the technology was possible, (2) Vannevar Bush’s legendary Memex papers of the 1940s were an early influence, raising the possibility of hyperlinked documents and images,  and (3) a desire to make a “personal transaction processing system”, one which can prove you did X or said Y at time Z. Maybe this will come bundled with MS Windows 2008? (-;
• Bell has a personal assistant to help him with the scanning. I think we can forgive him this, he’s in his 70s.
• Retrieval is still the challenge. Modern computer technology makes experience capture and storage trivial. However, how does one get back to that particular photo of the cute girl you met at the party last week? Microsoft’s Horowitz details time-based retrieval techniques (e.g. show me “July 4th 2007″ but it remains to be seen how well this scales to an archive of the size of Bell’s)
• Bell is based in San Francisco where he likes to stir things up by wearing a C.I.A. cap. I like his style!

More on MyLifeBits here.