My Cloud Library

(or “No, it will not be meta-ironic if I call it Spellr”)
The inline spell-checker in FireFox 2 is one of its most useful features. Particularly now that I am writing much more text within the browser. The days when I really only typed little more than passwords and occasional email addresses into browsers are well past. Today I am typing long blog posts, short comments, and all sorts of data into web applications.
I habitually work on more than one computer. A practice which has revealed an (perhaps unforeseen) opportunity within this dictionary/spelling space.
The pre-loaded core dictionary that the spell-checker begins with is of limited utility without all of the custom words: names, surnames, brand names, and industry-specific terms that I am constantly adding. Extrapolating from the individual to the collective, each of us has our own unique, arguably valuable, collection of words
FireFox caches my unique wordset onto my hard drive. When I write a first draft blog post on my work Mac, I correct all of my mis-spellings and add all of the unrecognised, yet correctly-spelt, words into my custom dictionary. Later, when I complete that post on our home laptop, the screen is once again littered with red underlines as that second instance of FireFox is checking my text against its own local custom dictionary. I then have to go though those words again, adding each of them to this custom dictionary. (Once you have published a few blog posts with screaming typos in them, you get pretty careful about copy-checking before hitting the Publish button.)
Therefore, why not have my custom wordset out in the cloud, and not stored locally at all? Think of doing for spell-checking what Del.icio.us does for bookmarking. Actually best not to think in terms of spell-checking at all. That is really only the task supported by, and enhanced by, your personal wordset. It is more helpful to think a lot broader than the specific example I gave above. Think of your custom wordset as data that you continually add more value to every day. There have to be great benefits to having that dataset be accessible across multiple platforms and also to-be portable. For example, say a FireFox-killer arrives in a few years time, do I want to have to start the whole process of generating a complete new custom dictionary again if I migrate to a new browser? Or if I change job and am issued with a new laptop? Do I want to have to teach my friend’s names to every new mobile phone that I buy?
I did a quick search and the existing model for online services in this space are basic spell-checking sites: paste in a block of text and have it checked. A closer model to what I envisage is Google’s inline spell-checker (which seems to override FireFox’s, although I am unsure how that pecking order works). What I cannot divine is whether theirs is fully integrated or not. I want to teach GoogleSpell a word by adding it while writing a Gmail today and have it recognise the same word in Google Docs tomorrow*. If I include someone’s nickname in their contact details in Gmail, then I want Gspell to not flag that word as misspelled in my Gmail. Making this happen within a suite of products yoked together with a common user profile and log-in has to be more manageable than aiming for the Internet at large. Building this within a related suite of applications could provide short term lock-in.
Back to creating this as a stand-alone web service then, technically speaking there would be some a lot of non-trivial issues to overcome to achieve this. Would you have to log-in to your browser to activate your wordset? Or, if the service is disassociated from the browser, would it need an open tab at all times? Interoperability with all my devices and platforms would be ideal: I imagine writing something in my smartphone on the morning commute; giving it a polish in Google Docs over lunch, and then publishing via Blogger that evening. Would it be better for my smartphone to simply cache the most current wordset when I sync it, or to pull it live directly out of the cloud?
Another issue is that a service like this adds another component to your online data shadow. If someone (say a potential employer) could gain access to your personal wordset and run statistical analysis or personality profiling over it, what are the implications there? As usual the Faustian trade-off appears to be increased functionality versus having your private data residing out of your absolute control.
Batting this one around with David, he pointed out that, apart from giving the Google Conspiracy Faction even more to fret about, this class of solution will probably evolve into a component of a master personal dataset stored online. This ultimate dataset facilitating everything from spell-check, drag-and-drop files/data/ in and out, to whatever your having yourself. Therefore not being computer/browser/Google-specific. All of which gives me a few more ideas...

*It does not at the moment. I used the made-up word “Cloodliberairiewooord” to check.
Delicious Tags: Online Dictionary | Browser | | Productivity
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Elemental Particles of the Web

Time was when the fundamental unit of the online experience was the web-site, then it was the web-page, and the ‘post‘ is now angling to become our dominant paradigm. Well it looks like things may be being granulated to an even finer scale again. I have been reading up on microformats, which is one of those ‘so-simple-its-obvious’ kind of ideas. (Onwards towards the semantic web and all of that.) I know that my Web-Fu is not up to the task of hacking together any complex microformat implementations into this blog. But I imagine that I may not have to wait too long for these to become an integrated feature of the major blogging engines. I could see myself using hCards and hCalendar from today.

I might see about embedding an hCard into my contact page on my work site. I will put one up here too. But, in the true spirit of cart-before-horse I have gone ahead and designed the icon first.

Technorati Tags: microformats

Getting It Together

With eighteen weeks or so to go until ‘Day Zero’, Val and I are undoubtedly progressing with the nesting phase — clearing out and sorting out a lot of the extraneous material from our house prior to the arrival of The Tribble. The mood is obviously becoming infectious as I find myself executing a similar process with all of my own flotsam and miscellanies in the digital realm.

(Attention Conservation Notice: the following is pretty much some nerd-orientated thinking-out loud type of material, so if you have anything better to do, etc.)

Inspired by the Digital Aggregation article (linked to on 7 February 2005) I have been conducting a slash and burn operation on my own ‘data silos’. Not surprisingly, email has turned out to be the biggest headache. One of the downsides of our having three computers at home is that you end up with emails stashed away on three separate hard disks. So finding any one email whenever you need to is more complicated than it ought to be. There is more joy when you factor in all of the personal emails sent to my work address and stored on my hard disk there. A further complication there is that, as work only switched to Entourage last year, the majority of that archive of emails is buried in a Quickmail client that is not even online anymore. Whatever is a boy to do?

A Gmail account with 1000MB of online storage seemed a good place to start (thanks Benny!) That is now making a good repository for all of the old content I might conceivably want to look at again. It also gives me some more useful tools than Outlook. Each email can be tagged with as many classes as I like, so I can sort and review along multiple axis. My whole archive is Google-searchable, so finding that really obscure web link from Daragh should now be a doddle. Ultimately the clincher is that, because it is an offsite cache, I will now have access to this material wherever I go online.

However, now there is the not-inconsiderable matter of incrementally going through my old emails and ruthlessly applying the 80:20 rule to find those pearls of wisdom worth retaining. Which task is going to eat up quite a few of my foreseeable lunch breaks...