Do you like the way computers make us do storage?

Hierarchical storage. What a great idea! My hat's off to the guy that came up with the idea of infinitely-nested layers of directories (or folders as we like to call them now) that can have as many files as needed. What a brilliant way to organize digital data. Modern operating systems or application suites could not exist without this concept. Seems so blindingly obvious now that you wonder where I am going with this.

If you think about it, a hierarchical model is ideal for organizing lots of separate pieces. The names of the folders can mean something or they may not. It doesn't matter because you can still express in code that a given piece of data is in a place that defined by this precise syntax of sub-directories and it will be there. Unless you deliberately move it. Its deterministic, it can be permanent and it can accommodate new files and new directories later on when the need exists.

But if you use this for your personal data it gets nasty. Can you remember where you stored that text file containing the street address of that excellent restaurant in Seattle where you had those great mussels last November? No, so you've got to hunt for it. Now the sheer number of directories fights against you. There's too many paths. You work down them randomly. You try to do a file search down a few folders. But was it end of November or first week of December? Did you even spell it correctly in your haste? You give up because the amount of work required to find that information outstrips your desire to have it.

Sad thing is, you've got computer skills. You knew how to do a file search, right? What about the new computer user who doesn't understand that a picture of a word in an image file is different than a text file containing that word? What chance have they got to find that file? Yeah, maybe they'll grit their teeth and slog through a download and installation of Google's latest desktop search utility. But will some conceptual misunderstanding of how to use that tool defeat them in the end?

To remember a personal thing, you need a real-world reference. That's the way the brain has evolved over the past eons. You operate with visual or aural clues to other things that have some sort of abstract relationship. Why is it that you can remember how to drive to that restaurant in Seattle the next time you're down there even though you gave up on finding its address at home? You only had a vague idea where it was in the city, but you got there. What's happening here? Hey, a city is a city and it has roads and some roads have buildings that look like large boxes, but this one was weird because it had all of its windows in that interesting geometric pattern, and wasn't that just before I turned left, and ..... Try and capture that in a text file.

The point is that we've got the technology to store lots of things, but now we've got to build some new tools that use this technology wastefully, perhaps, but get the job done in new ways. I've got some ideas. Want to hear them?