David Weinberger's Buzz Soup:

"KNOWLEDGE-BASED FINGERTIPS"

By David Weinberger
Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

We all know that the most important knowledge resides in our fingertips. Ask a pianist. Ask Aristotle: a good person has good habits. Who has time to think all the damn time?

So, recall a time when every application you used had its own best way for your fingertips to do things. If you were a WordStar user, you moved up a line with ^W and saved a document with the equally intuitive ^KS. If you were a WordPerfect user, to move ahead a character you'd use Shift-Alt-Function 5 while looking at yourself in a mirror once owned by a dead unrequited lover. Each configuration had its own justification, and once you were trained in any particular one, you entered a religious order devoted to the extermination of all the heretical scum who used other products.

Then, things changed. Windows stole the mappings from the Macintosh and started "suggesting" -- in the knee-cracking way that Redmond has of presenting ideas for our consideration -- that application designers include those standard mappings. Thus did ^C come to mean copy and ^V come to mean paste, and all the fingertips were dancing in harmony. You could now take it for granted, and what else does "knowing" something but no longer having to think about it?

Now, grrrls and boise, it's time to take the next step. We need more mappings, dammit. In fact, we need a whole constellation of mappings. It's time to invoke a Federation of Keystroke Overlords ("Fk Overs?") who will "suggest" a standard set of extended mappings that will be offered as an alternative by all applications from now on. Topics would include:

New common functions that deserve their own standard keystrokes, including but not limited to: find, uppercase and lowercase, increase and decrease font, hide graphics, ignore this hyperlink, repeat previous command, and subscribe to JOHO.

Standardized meta-keys for extending the keyboard. PC users have Shift, Alt and Control readily available. Which do you use when, hmmm? While there's some agreement (Shift often means Extend Selection), let's have more rationality here!

Standard keyboard map files. Since all applications should have completely configurable keyboards, they all should have plain-text files that express those mappings. If we could agree on what those files should look like -- it ain't hard, it's just a list of commands and keystrokes, one per line -- then we could have a single tool for reconfiguring the keyboard for any application.

If we begin with smarter fingertips, who knows, we might end up with smarter larynxes, smarter orifices, and maybe even -- dare we say it -- smarter brains. (The brain is always the last to know!)

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The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.