(2002-10-09) Udell On Zoe

Jon Udell gives a nice review/context (and some nice "real" screenshots) for Zoe. Along with the directory of names, Zoe has organized all of the URLs that appear in my Info World-related EMail messages. This would be even more interesting if those URLs were named descriptively, but of course, that's a hard thing to do. Alternatively, Zoe could spider those URLs and produce a view offering contextual summaries of them. We don't normally think of desktop applications doing things like that, but Zoe (like Google) is really a service, working all the time, toiling in ways that computers should and people shouldn't... Most of the correlations I perform manually, using MsOutlook folders, could be inferred by a hypothetical version of Zoe that would group messages based on matching content in their bodies as well as in their headers, then generate titles for these groups by summarizing them... Google and, now, Zoe remind us that we can still add plenty of value to the poorly-structured stuff that we write every day. It's a brute-force strategy, to be sure, but isn't that why we have these 2GHz personal computers?