Rahul Dave:

One of the questions I want to pose, though, is this: how can we change the way we interact with the operating system, so that we land up creating more implicit and explicit links via our authoring? I suspect the answer there lies with storage allowing multiple characterization by the user and agents and by defining a Radio like shortcut notion which can be used in other documents. But, until we stop using hierarchical storage, this will be hard.

There's an exciting idea: kill the hierarchical file system and instead turn everything into a soup of interlinked documents. It will probably never completely happen, but you can see certainly see a shift coming from CMSs, weblogs, and the like. What would you call it? A "linked file system"? Does a document disappear if there's nothing linking to it? It would effectively become invisible in the absence of a search engine!

Hmm. I guess a weblog implements a sort of "chronological file system": each post is a file, they are sorted, presented, and typically stored chronologically.

I do know that, with a search engine on my desktop (<shameless_plug>e.g. prethink</shameless_plug>), I wouldn't need to remember where all my stuff is saved...