"Memory Craft introduces the best memory techniques humans have ever devised, from ancient times and the Middle Ages, to methods used by today’s memory athletes... offers proven techniques for teachers to help their students ... simple strategies for anyone who has trouble remembering ... older people who want to keep their minds agile

Systems with Design from Trust: assume most (not all) people have good intent."initially feel counterintuitive, even risky...social: they rely on human relationships. appealing: once you wrap your head around them, you want more."The discomfort is a symptom of how today's default setting is mistrust: "we’ve internalized the assumption that humans …

"Do you have a job that you secretly believe is pointless?... you have a “bullshit job.”", and so do "millions of ... clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel...".We built enough tech to free us, but instead "we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsa…

Liberating Structures is a pattern language that "provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices... [which are] either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people ... to gene…

Good starting point on pattern languages, ends with useful links.As a definition of what a pattern is: "a proven solution to a problem in a context. Each one documents a reusable solution, encapsulates knowledge about successful practices, and provides information about its usefulness and tradeoffs... Connected sets of interrelated patterns build…

I do like a challenge."We live in the most distracted time in human history. Can we reclaim our attention spans?... A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention... we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and more …

Kevin Marks used his personal site to scribe the Betaworx Render ToolsforThought conference (context), and I'm intrigued. Like a lot of scribed notes, it's difficult to follow, although there are plenty of good quotes. But every quote seems linked to a URL for the speaker (Twitter account, website), and given the speed of writing there's probably …

Flancian of course used his Agora to scribe the Betaworx Render ToolsforThought conference (context). Like most Agora nodes it's very long - here are some highlights that stood out for me at the time of writing (his notes, like mine, are unfinished):On the risk of being a productivity geek: ""The pattern we see is people optimizing the tool and o…

Another scribe of the Betaworx Render conference on Thinking Tools (context), this time in good old-fashioned blogpost form, with scans of handwritten notes to boot. Contrasting this with some of the other annotations, it's a good example of the difference between "someone else's notes" and "someone else's blog post".Good intro: when I first got i…

Chris Aldrich asks: "is anyone actively using Hypothes.is as an off-label zettelkasten just by itself?... [it has] most of the basic functionalities:imple note taking,Notes are editable and update-able,There’s a tag functionality for indexing notes,One can add links to other notes to cross link them if they liked,There’s a reasonably good search f…

"What does it look like to design a system [the internet] for survivability?" This different question - not design for efficiency, or profitability - led "to different answers, and breakthroughs that made the internet we have today".Rather than protect something, "the r-selected response ... LOCKSS stands for "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe," ...…

One of the scribes from the Betaworx Render TfT conference (context): "The discussion of AI/ML/semantic-woo was one trigger for me adding some notes about the manual process of Digital Gardening... some folks are tweeting with hashtag ToolsforThinking."Like anyone's notes, these are hard for someone else to follow, although they do help identify w…

Notes on Gordon Brander's demo at the Render conference (context): "I’m using different note-taking tools to scribe different conference sessions - this Hedgedoc was automatically created by [[flancian]]'s [[an agora]] page for the conference".He introduces Noosphere, a lowlevel permissionless p2p protocol he hopes will allow ideas to break free …

"we'll be exploring new advancements in the space ... taking tours of new projects, learning about knowledge graphs as public resources, discussing recent advancements in AI and ML in understanding semantic meaning of ideas... how we use these tools ourselves."I joined a small posse of people organised byJerry Michalski to scribe the event, as it …

I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introduction, i…

Win my place at David McRaney ’s upcoming workshop by helping me write a chapter in an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs.

A short experiment on getting the most out of podcasts by using speech-to-text engines to create rtanscripts. TL:DR:Welder’s excellent and free; Otter.ai’s got some amazing features, but it’s pricey; just forget Google.

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

An interactive knowledge visualisation providing a graphical overview of interrelated online concepts, edited dynamically with an Excel file. Featuring an accessible version driven by the same content.

I've been invited to write a chapter on an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs), in which I intend exploring both the PKG I see at the heart of the MyHub thinking tool / content management system, and the Social Knowledge Graphs which will appear when these systems are interlinked across the Fediverse.Everything I write specifically f…

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this episode so I …

In this edition: a first tweak to the default navigation phrase, a look ahead to the next changes, and some of the things I've recently read (and written) influencing my ideas for MyHub.ai as I prepare a chapter of an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Management.

We've tweaked the navigation phrase so that the default is to show "All the" resources on your home page, rather than just "The Best". More tweaks are on the way.

"Feeling stuck?" This YANSS podcast is with "professor, author, therapist, and speaker Britt Frank, a trauma specialist who ... helps clients to get out of the feeling of being stuck."This was well-timed, because stuck is something I've been feeling for a while now. Perhaps unjustifiably, but nevertheless her book's description strikes a chord: wh…

Basically this piece starts to unpack for me my ideas of what millions of Hubs networked together and processed by AI would offer the world in terms of content discovery:With "tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise ... people are aggregating content ... reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs... fragmented, poo…

Covers "a new class of apps called “Integrated Thinking Environments (ITEs)”... [and] NOTE framework, used to describe the specific feature sets ITEs provide... examples and some future directions".The term ITE riffs off "Integrated Development Environments... provide developers a comprehensive set of tools ... a kind of augmented cognition for pr…

Really good but short piece on how most "Note-taking apps have ways they want you to work, a grain you should follow. Except Obsidian... an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for text files ... [not] a note-taking app... an integrated thinking environment. ".Hence you have to set it up to support the way you want to work, rather than going…

An overview of three protocols - ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt and Dat - and their complementary roles in helping redistribute power from "large centralized corporate interests and back into the hands of individual people and small groups... No one protocol [is enough] ... each protocol has its strengths and weaknesses". We need "developers and design…

Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be ActivityPub comp…

A "How I use it" from Ivo. "Roam changed the game [by] ... treating the data as a graph ... [and] allowing blocks to quickly be nested, referred to, embedded, created from a piece of text in a block, appear in the sidebar, being searched and queried".Ivo developed a way of ontologising his Roam graph: "In the context of a block, I know if I mean …