Sorry for the negativity, but this post is the perfect example of the wishy-washy rhetoric that people interested in this domain always use.
For examples of what I'm talking about, browse this tedious litany [1] (roam-whitepaper), see if you manage to get pass the first paragraph [2]. BTW, the price for the "Believer" plan of roam [1] is $500 dollars. Roam itself is advertised with the hashtag "#roamcult". Pretty strong BS signals coming from this one.
To address the poetic waxing more directly, it's important to remember that we still don't have very good language to talk about the "primitives of knowledge work", which is why I phrased my statement the way I did. We know it almost certainly doesn't involve the concept of "notes" (at least in the way we think about right now) and calling them simply "ideas" is altogether too vague.
As far as the #roamcult is concerned, we are overwhelmingly in agreement :)
Many write-only "scratchpad" notes are useful because they helped the mind focus and organize information. They can often be safely archived or discarded.
The idea is that the app "understands" the structure of the content. A bit like a combination of a notebook, Xcode, a calendar, and Wolfram Alpha :)
Bi-directional links and timestamps are working already so implementing a "Zettelkasten" should be possible with the current version.
If you're interested, there's a signup for the beta here:
I’m less excited about the connection to Zettelkasten because that smells of fad.
If there were an app that would make useful sense out of a few tens of gigabytes of stuff kept in a plain folder hierarchy, I’d be a potential customer. In a way Dropbox tries to do this, and it’s better than nothing (for me) but I still wish for some kind of magical portal into my messy attic.
I'm curious about your folder hierarchy. What kind of files do you keep there to get to tens of gigabytes and what type of knowledge would you like to extract/what type of connections to form?
I'm currently at about 100 MB for roughly 1,400 individual notes (text and images).
So for my use-case the Organizer App would have to be able to deal with lots and lots of data of various types, occasionally including multi-gig files like the rough cut of a film, and also know when I "mv this ~/Organizer/that/" -- a tall order, I know. But with storage so cheap these days, I still dream of that.
The app I'm working is more focused on capturing knowledge as structured notes. It sounds like a good full text search could already be of help in your case. That maybe combined with slowly categorizing your content with a system like Johhny.Decimal or something similar.
You've described the problem really eloquently. You've obviously put a lot of thought into this. I don't see contact info for you. My email is in my profile. I'd love to chat if you're interested.
What I wish for is a useful melding of easy stuff like Notes.app, structured stuff like a custom database, and my reams of notes taken on physical paper. Oh and scrapbooks, web clippings, etc.
At the end of every brainstorm I throw up my hands, say this is too complicated to ever be worth doing, and resolve to change the way I gather and generate information.
I'm curious how is your solution different from the Zettelkasten-inspired note taking tools?
My contact info is on my profile
Is there a mailing list or some other place to track progress?
What I envision is more of a knowledge space navigator that lives from connections and links (Wikipedia!) but allows a personal state of information and annotation/augmentation on top of it.
I want something that digitally represents my state of thought while augmenting it with a clean version of the world's knowledge and related information, if that makes sense.
Imagine writing a crypto algorithm - a browser with 30 tabs open and a note app plus my IDE feel like a clumsy and ineffective way to truly put my mind and thoughts into the context of work. It simply feels like doing digitally what people did in the 1960s with pen and paper, encyclopedias and books on their desk.
However, the internet and our hardware today feel like they allow to add at least one another dimension. For many, it's a hunch and a revolutionary product waiting to happen.
I kid you not. I left after 6 weeks. I snuck out the work with me (I wasn't "allowed" to bring it home.) If you're interested I'd be more than happy to share the code.
I think it was really revolutionary.
Essentially it used grammatical structures to arrange text in a navigable 2d space which he needed because he was a highly visual and spatial learner.
But what it allowed for is a nonlinear and a nonsequential arrangement of ideas using Wikipedia text, not just some simple mindmap stuff.
I used Wikipedia as an example in a prototype engine I made.
Articles Flowed Into each other through a continuous navigable space. You could interact and engage to go cognitively deeper and expand a new path, as opposed to a series of documents. Wikipedia became one continuous thing that you could endlessly navigate through a 2d space of.
The content wasn't large blocks of text but broken up using a separate visual language so that there'd only be a few words then a relation to another group and so on. This kept the concepts spatially relative and made the distinction of pages disappear.
It did it all automatically. Really amazing stuff. I also worked with Ted Nelson, this guy's methods were better. No question.
He developed the techniques over about 20 years manually and had transferred textbooks to rolls of butcher paper that he kept in cabinets. He totally didn't understand the value of his process as something as transformative as Vannevar Bush's As We May Think.
Instead he wanted to make it a proprietary format with proprietary content under a private publishing company for childhood education. He wanted a kludgy editor to make new content with and then a kludgy viewer for single topic things. He wanted to dictate the interface, keystrokes...
Because once again he's an authoritarian pedant. Bah, he didn't see what he made.
Ideas need to be controlled at the right level of abstraction and liberated at the others. That's what Linus knows that RMS doesn't. That's what TBL knows that Nelson doesn't. That's what Jobs knew but Apple doesn't.
I wanted to run with the idea but yeah, 7 years ago and I've done nothing. I got everything still.
I should stop everything and finish it. It's really something radically different. I think it will change at least the way I personally learn things.
The campaign to convince others, yeah well, no guarantees there.
But in all seriousness, best of luck to you. I hope you create a truly revolutionary product.
Serious thought involves more than just collections and associations: mastery requires repetition, creativity requires serendipitous discovery, and productive output requires flow states. It’s also a matter of acknowledging the fact that “units of knowledge” do not exist on their own: all knowledge is embedded in context (or “deeply intertwingled”, in the words of Ted Nelson), and without context, metaphor, and nuance, we cannot form meaningful connections. By baking these attributes into the medium itself, it’s possible to build an information space that’s simple to explore, can surface information when you need it, can augment the mind’s naturally ability to form connections, and can get out of the way the rest of the time.