Quick thoughts on Backpack for personal productivity

I started using Backpack when I noticed that my friend and former Salon.com colleague Scott Rosenberg commented on it recently. I hadn't paid Backpack much attention until Scott mentioned it, and since I recall Scott being a heavy user and evaluator of such applications (especially Ecco Pro), I thought I would check it out. (Yes, it's from the same folks who brought us Basecamp).

Backpack is not just a piece of web-based software. It has the makings of a movement with its spirited manifesto and gushing adherents ("I want to marry it," says one user on the manifesto page). This is not a criticism -- just the opposite. Getting people excited about software is a lost art, and this kind of loving devotion is what all software developers should be shooting for.

Backpack organizes your life in terms of pages, which they describe this way: A page is a collection of any combination of text, to-do lists, images, or files. Some ideas for pages include "My trip to Paris" or "Furniture I eventually want to buy" or "Things I want to do this summer" or "My favorite quotes" or "Ideas for the bathroom renovation" or "People we need to interview for the job.". For me, the mix of structured and unstructured information in Backpack more closely mirrors the makeup of my own cluttered human brain than anything I've used -- at least so far. Like many of you, I tend to get hot and bothered about new technologies (note to self: remember your brief Groove obsession!), so to some degree, I need to wait and see how things look a month from now.

That being said, this one feels right already. I think in terms of things, not functions, which has made my past efforts of getting organized a little frustrating. Think about how Palm OS is designed, for example. If you want to make a to-do list, you can use the Tasks app. If you want to make some free-form notes, you use Memos. Everything is in its own silo based on what app it will fit into, not on how you need to reference the information in context. In Backpack, I just create a page around a particular thing I'm working on, which I did recently when I was hosting a 4th of July barbeque. I made a shopping list on my "4th of July barbeque" page using the List function and used the Notes function to enter recipes. The interface leverages the AJAX approach nicely, making entering information easy and fast.

The clincher for me, though, was Backpack Mobile, a stripped-down web interface that leaves the AJAX behind but works really well on the web browser on my Treo. I like keeping all of my information centrally stored online, and I'm ok with depending on a solid GPRS connection to get to that information, despite the obvious risks. When I went shopping for my barbeque recently, I used Backpack Mobile to check items off my list and reference the recipes I had loaded. I didn't have to do any hot synching with my Treo when I got home after shopping to update my PC (I am the type of guy who hot syncs less often than he should). In the mobile age, this is what "cross-platform" really means -- think beyond the "does it work on a Mac?" discussion (though it should, of course), because it's got to work on a mobile device to really be useful.

Backpack is simple, but is loaded with features and capabilities like their API (a very nice touch) and e-mail/mobile reminders. It's probably not for everybody, but I'm liking it.

The Grande Vista Sanitarium: serendipitous adventures as a citizen historian

Speaking to our collective neglect of history, Will Durant once wrote: Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years. No place is this more true than the blogging world, where we all seem to be hyper-focused on the last few minutes. Exploiting the now-now-now mindset of the blogosphere, PubSub goes so far as to invite users to "search the future!" Are we already so dissatisfied with the immediate present that PubSub has to promise the search version of time travel to get our attention?!

What about the historical past? I'm not talking about the past in blogging terms (which would be yesterday, or at worst, last week). We're all building up mounds of historical records of contemporary events through blogging and other forms of personal publishing, but how can we use the web to create stronger and more illuminating connections to the past? How do we learn the slow lessons of history in a world where we're only thinking about the last seven minutes? I think stumbled upon one way -- this is a little lengthy, so bear with me as I explain.

One of my favorite things to do is go mountain biking in the Berkeley and Oakland hills, particularly in Tilden Regional Park and Wildcat Canyon. I usually pack my camera and when I'm lucky, I capture some interesting photos (like this one -- it surprises people who don't live here that in such a populated place as the Bay Area, I bike regularly among herds of cows).

Last August, I wrote about an interesting discovery on my personal web site:

Over the past few years, I've become intimately familiar with the mountain bike trails of Tilden and Wildcat Canyon Regional Parks, two vast open spaces in the Berkeley hills. I had always found one area particularly curious: in the middle of one cow pasture, a couple of majestic palm trees sprout seemingly from nowhere near the Belgum Trail (others have noticed and photographed this curiosity). When you reach the end of the Belgum Trail, a paved road to nowhere appears -- it looks like a road that was used for car traffic at some point, but there are no signs of it now. This area, situated on the far west side of Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, always had an unusual feel whenever I rode through it -- the otherwordly palm tree, the road to nowhere. It's strange to feel such a strong sense of place when you are crossing no obvious boundaries into anywhere. On a recent mountain bike trip, I discovered that I had been missing something in my earlier trips -- I was in fact crossing into something. This area with the weird vibe had been the site of a sanitarium in the early 1900s -- the Grande Vista Sanitarium, sometimes referred to as the "Belgum Sanitarium," after the Dr. Belgum who ran the hospital. Somehow, I had missed a small information kiosk in my earlier visits that explained the story. When I returned from my trip, Google searches didn't turn up much information about the old sanitarium, so I used the photos I took of the kiosk to reconstruct the story of the Belgum Sanitarium here for online posterity.

The sanitarium itself is long gone, but the foundation is still there along with the driveway and orchards that remain beautiful even in their slow decline. I posted the text I had transcribed from my photos to my web site: a narrative, a short history, and the text of a contemporary brochure about the sanitarium. As time passed, I noticed that a Google search for "belgum sanitarium" or "grande vista sanitarium" began turning up my page as the #1 result. In a very short time, I had become the online authority for the mysterious old sanitarium ruins I had only discovered a scant year earlier -- and my logs started filling up with other people searching for information on the Belgum Sanitarium. I was pleased to provide the online information that I was unable to find when I first encountered the place just last year.

My experience as the online authority for the Grande Vista Sanitarium grew more compelling within the past few weeks. I recently traded e-mail with Chris Anderson when I wrote about the Long Tail, and Chris realized from my personal web site that we both shared a mutual appreciation for Tilden and Wildcat Canyon parks, the site of the ruins of the old sanitarium. When I wrote back to Chris just over a week ago, I said:

I get a surprising amount of traffic to those pages from people searching Google for 'belgum sanitarium.' I feel satisfied that I've done my duty as an online citizen historian by bringing something from the pre-Internet physical world into the Google index. I'm hoping someone will eventually e-mail me with an interesting story or anecdote about the place so I can add it to the historical record I'm creating. I'm almost *expecting* it.

Last night, I got this e-mail:

In one of your pages (http://www.chaddickerson.com/misc/belgum/history.html), you mention Dr. Tewksbury, his daughter Eugenia and her second husband, William Mintzer, as part of the story of Belgum Asylum.   Do you have additional information on them or know where I can get it? Dr. Tewksbury's wife, Emily, was my 2nd great-grandaunt, and I am trying to reach her descendants. [name withheld until I ask the person if it's ok to post it here. -CD]

Cool! This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Earlier this week, I had noticed referrals from Google containing searches for Dr. Tewskbury (who built the mansion that eventually housed the sanitarium) and William Mintzer, so I felt like something was up. While plenty of attention has been paid to leveraging citizens media to promote conversation about contemporary events, I think we neglect history too often in the right-now adrenaline rush of the present. When we measure the importance of something by where it sits (or not) in an online search index, we miss out on, well, everything that is not in an online search index, which is the majority of recorded human history, as my experience suggests. Until I made a deliberate effort to inject the long-forgotten story of the sanitarium into the online sphere, it essentially did not exist and the sense of enchantment I felt visiting the old place was lost on everyone except those who stumbled upon it. I'm glad I took the time to record it, and helping this gentleman connect to his past, even in a small way, will be its own reward. I'm hoping other people will use their digital cameras not just to take standard photos, but to take close-up photos of documents as I did, and transcribe them for online posterity when the historical record doesn't exist online. I'm certain this is happening already, but I'm hoping that by posting this, even more people will be inspired to be citizen historians, annotating the past as aggressively as they annotate the present as citizen journalists. It might not provide the transient thrill of being Slashdotted, or showing up in Scoble's linkblog, but it's probably a deeper satisfaction.

So what now with the gentleman searching for his descendants? Of course, I'll write back to him to see how I can help with his search (the domain for his e-mail is registered in Miami, so I think I'm closer to the action), but I'm going to do one more thing to complete the picture (literally). When I last visited the site of the sanitarium ruins, I had my camera, but I had recently lost my GPS, so I couldn't record the latitude/longitude coordinates of the place (being remote and abandoned except for a stray cow or two, it has no street address). I'm planning to go back there next weekend (a new GPS is on its way via Amazon) to get the coordinates, then I'm going to use that information to whip something up with one or both of the map APIs released last week (Google, Yahoo). I'm wondering what that strange and majestic palm tree looks like from a satellite. . . . and maybe I will be able to give someone a visual sense of the stunningly beautiful hills where his 2nd great-grandaunt Emily lived so long ago.