But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.

For the past three years, I've been using tools comparable to the new ones hitting the market, so I have extensive firsthand experience with the way the software changes the creative process. (I have used a custom-designed application, created by the programmer Maciej Ceglowski at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and now use an off-the-shelf program called DEVONthink.) The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.

Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for.

I'm always looking for better information management tools and work hard to knit together a suite of tools to suit my purpose. What exactly are the "nearly a dozen new programs" that are more tools for thoughts than the more easily manageable items such as words? Is he talking about desktop search systems, which I don't think of as being sufficient fuzzy to behave the way Johnson wants. I'd be interested in trying out the application that Johson uses, DEVONThink, except that I don't have a Mac OS X machine right now. I keep my fingers crossed that the Chandler will yield a system that will let me retire my system that combines among many things EccoPro, my filesystem, my wikis, my weblogs, Flickr. And I think of Scholar's Box as providing some glue that I don't necessarily expect Chandler to have.

BTW, Johnson's essay about seeing your words as though for the first time reminds me of the term re-encounter that Cathy Marshall used in a talk about personal digital libraries.