Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated gives an interesting illustration of the “filter on the way out” idea from EiM. He notices that Picasa has been silently aggregating the images in his blog. Now he can go back through it and notice relationships and trends. He gives six steps of working through the pile of images. The six step certainly seem to work for this example, but I’m not sure how generalizable it is since, in my view, the miscellaneous is a pile of raw potential for the emergence of every sort of understanding and meaning, from noticing that you’ve used lots of pictures of Michael Jackson to running statistical and semantic tools that discover deeply hidden relationships.

The idea behind “filter on the way out” is that it’s often (usually?) better to give users tools for sorting through the pile the way that suits them than to <i>only</i> give them a single, pre-baked categorization.