I just happened on this while reading Jon Udell's Instant Outlining article, but I thought it worth posting.  I'm kind of stuck on the concept of emergent intelligent behaivor at this moment and thought this a perfect example of how something complex is made manageable.

"The essence of this strategy is to work bottom-up, rather than top-down. I don't start with a predefined set of topics. Rather, I allow them to emerge from the material as I work my way through it. I don't try to create a topic hierarchy. Having wrestled with questions such as whether XML should be a subcategory of Web Development, or vice versa, I've concluded that this way lies madness. My goal now is simply to assign resources to a flat list of topics--from 15 to, at most, 40 of them, depending on the data set. The resulting topic map isn't fancy, but it chunks the data set usefully, it's easy to create, and it's easy to maintain. "

Jon continues the article with the discussion and example code of a PERL script that assists with building and visualizing your topic database.  After that he describes the process of refining the topic list again touching on the bottom up approach  "...That's why it's best to start with more specificity than you'll need, and generalize as you iterate."

Finally, Jon wraps up the article with a look at how current CMS software (namely Radio) relates to this concept and how in the future CMS software might improve on the concept.  Worth mention at this point is Movable Type 2.0 which does allow in part for some of these capabilites as well as Radio.

• Assigment of postings to multiple categories.
• These categories can be reanamed on the fly (unlike Radio)
• Power editing mode allows for performing same action on multiple post (ie category changes)

Radio does have one up on MT though, by allowing for category metadata such as title and description.

  9:26:01 AM    

"It opens in situ, expanding within the current context of the outline. Transcluding content in this way is a long-overdue feature of the Web. What's especially stunning, though, is that the feature is here woven into an authoring tool that aims to replace email as the primary mode of communication in closely-knit collaborative teams. "

I believe I may finally be getting my head around this Instant Outlining thing that Userland has unleashed.  I agree that it sounds (at least in theory) like it could be a replacement for email.  It combines some of the better aspects of instant messaging with email in a structured and persistant format.  I think the persistant part is especially attractive.  Maybe even more so than the instant aspect. 

But as indicated by even Dave himself, the interface is crude.  Hopefully someone will grab the ball, run with it (since IO is open) and create a simple interface.  This interface would make the technology accessible enough where I could recommend it (without fear of '...you want me to what?') to friends or better yet, co-workers who don't use Radio.

I'm sure there are probably a handful or so busy on this at the moment in one fashion or another.  Hopefully, one of them will capitalize on the IM models out there already and find a way to leverage that as a instant outlining interface as well.

  8:32:23 AM