Mark Bernstein: Tinderbox

{Note added Jan 31st}: Tinderbox is made by Eastgate Systems, Inc. I hope the correction below is an accurate description of the concepts reported.

Mark Bernstein and Eastgate Systems Inc. have developed what seems to be a great tool to take, organize and brainstorm on, notes: a personal content management assistant. It is Tinderbox: a Tool for Notes. Tinderbox is a program that gets installed on a Mac (a Windows version is due later) and helps brainstorm with ideas and notes. It even helps with putting up those notes on a blog. I am just cheking it up these days. It seems really great.
Mark works in the field of Information Architecture: this is why he (and his company, Eastgate) designed Tinderbox, in the first instance. IA “is the practice to structure information for a purpose” (from wikipedia).
He also wrote a book, The Tinderbox Way, which shows his vision. What I like about his work is his effort to establish criteria of excellence for blogs. This is another reason why he got invited as keynote in quite a few conferences around the world, about blogs and other stuff (for instance, BlogHui, the blog conf of New Zealand: What Good Is A Weblog? -Wellington, New Zealand. March 2006- …may one day I go there!). And he produced great presentations, which are available at his Lecture Notes site.

He says:

“The Ultimate Aim of All Creative Activity Is the Weblog
Why is this claim preposterous, while the Bauhaus manifesto raises no objection? Weblogs today are written and read by millions, and yet we have almost no useful discussion of weblog excellence. What shall we emulate? What should be deplore?”
While watching some of his presentations I wanted to check what tool they were built with. After a little investigation, I discovered it: Keynote by Apple! A little-known presentation tool, which exports presentations in Quicktime videos, or Flash movies (and PowerPoint slides). Presentations made with Impress look very neat and good-colored, too! Keynote is part of the Apple suite iWork. BTW, also openoffice.org saves presentations in a Flash.

Last blot of news: Mark will be program chair on Hypertext Culture and Communication: art, literature, phillosophy, and the hypertext tools to support them at Hypertext ’07 (Manchester, England).

About Antonio Vantaggiato

Professor, web2.0 enthusiast, and didactic chef.
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2 Responses to Mark Bernstein: Tinderbox

  1. avunque says:

    …OOPS. Sorry, I’m going to correct the mistake!

  2. Mark A says:

    Tinderbox is actually made by Eastgate Systems, Inc.

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