Flutterby™! : Email, privacy, and more

A fascinating Law Meme article on the Laurie Garrett memo from Davos (in case you're lost, here's the original email) had Lyn over at Medley pushing it in various places and linking to it. Rafe Colburn has more background.

Once I fix the HTML templates for the new Flutterby code and check that in so that Todd and others can use it, I've been thinking that my next home programming project should be a personal content manager. It'd be cool if I could organize all my email and photos and web surfing together, and be able to look through it with various different search and sort functions, and associate it in different patterns. Of course I also want to be able to share some of these collections, and in doing that I need to make sure that I don't betray any confidences. Most of the email forums I participate in have fairly strict "do not archive" rules. Some have "don't hint to anyone that this exists" rules. And I'll leave it to you to find it, but I push the boundary of one of those rules in this very entry. So looking at the factors of when I should copy data rather than linking to it, what sort of history and retraction mechanisms there are, and what happens when a friend passes a link to that data along to another friend, is all interesting to me. I'll try to ramble a bit in the comments to this later.