I first came across the interrelated concepts overviewed here after launching myhub, and realised I'd been developing similar ideas as far back as 2013, when I first piloted this Hub on Tumblr (see Why you need a Personal Content Strategy). My ideas for MyHub evolved as a result - I now see:
As far as I know this hasn't yet been done: creators are currently supposed to do their thinking in Obsidian, Roam or some other "thinking tool" software, and then publish their content using Wordpress, and then share it via Twitter. Why not make your public website - and the writing on it - a seamless extension of your second brain? And why not network it with other second brains via the Fediverse?
Why not make your public website - and the writing on it - a seamless extension of your second brain?
To turn these ideas into reality, however, I need to do a deep dive into thinking tools. I'm using my current personal content strategy - ie:
More: Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud
This Overview is therefore a crucial part of this process: it provides both a summary of what I have discovered in this space so far, and (below) a search result of the content I read when developing this Overview (stuff I Like), and the content I wrote and built as a result (stuff I Think and Do). In other words:
(Last update: 31/10/2021): When I created this overview I identified 10 pre-existing tags to use as a baseline: inbox zero, spaced repetition, 2ndbrain, fedwiki (for federated wiki), mindfulness, mindhack, (information) overload, roamresearch, weekly review and zettelkasten. That pulled in 44 resources, each with at least one of those tags.
(Feature idea: AI & visualisation tools integrated into my backoffice to help better surface concept clusters and the explore links between them).
Some notes on the major concept bundles:
Different tools have different elements, but here are some of the most important and/or common ones.
The 80/20 question (aka the Pareto principle) is central to productivity, and applies to many software tools - do you design it:
The flexible/difficult approach is IMHO best illustrated by roamresearch: it's enormously powerful and flexible, but to take advantage of that you need to dive deep and geek out on templates and other plug-in code developed by 3rd parties. If you don't - like me - you end up with a lot of notes, but you're not harvesting the true power of your second brain. For me it fails the 80/20 rule: too much effort to get something useful out of it.
Extremely powerful feature. In essence, it means that linking from page A to page B adds a link from B back to A, but there's a lot more to it than that. I'm currently most familiar with Bidirectional links from roamresearch, where every page is designed like a Zettelkasten overview, and there's a page for every tag.
To be continued.
Does the tool use pages to manage knowledge? Or is a page simply a collection of blocks, each with its own unique identity, allowing you to find and manipulate it separately from the page in which it was first created?
Again, I understand this question principally through the optic of roamresearch, which takes the latter approach. To be continued.
See: resources tagged #2ndbrain and #tool. I am currently migrating from RoamResearch to Obsdian, but you can't throw a stone without finding another one being launched.
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Automated links to recent, relevant Highlighted Resources follow.
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Google's new experimental product, Project Tailwind, is based on a "source-grounded AI ... allows you to define a set of documents as trusted sources ... a kind of ground truth ... craft a ... LLM that is not an all-knowing oracle or your new virtual buddy, but something closer to an efficient research assistant...This is exactly why I c…
Betaworx announcing "nine companies we selected and invested in for our THINKCamp accelerator program ... new technologies ranging from large language models and generative AI to graph databases and high-fidelity spatial user interfaces — to create tools for for how we may think."All probably worth checking out, ranging from Gordon Brand…
More or less exactly what I described in my PKG Chapter, although that includes AI and it's not clear that orbit does. "As you read, Orbit occasionally prompts you with quick questions to reinforce the ideas ... after a few days, Orbit will send you an email ... If you still remember an answer, you’ll next see it two weeks later. Then a …
An overview by Coda, with 20 more resources, on Coda & Notion, which both take "a modular approach to digital documentation. You can do traditional docs ... but you never have to leave the tool to build more complex workflows and processes".
Captures my ambivalence about Roam: it's a great tool to create a complete personal knowledge graph, but is the result really that useful? And if it's only for taking notes that are unlikely to be useful in the future, isn't it expensive?"Roam is an amazing tool for a certain type of person ... If you like to wander off down in…
Basic intro to #fedwiki. Makes me realise it's a valid tool for federating myhub."anyone can add or edit a [wiki] page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls... no one should have that sort of central control... [hence] the federated wiki... [where] the wiki put an edit button on every page... the federa…
Interesting, meandering analysis of different tools for thought.Craft "lacked databases - a key feature for any Notion user... [and is] limited to the Apple ecosystem", but they prioritised foundations first, features later: "a lot of work in exchange for small visibility - and users often don’t notice this until the point they (des…
Deep dive comparison between Roam Research (valuation: $200m) & Obsidian (Product Hunt Golden Kitty award, Productivity category). Criteria used & results:User Interface (Roam Research, only because Obsidian's learning curve is steeper)Graph View (Obsidian by far) Backlinks (Roam Research: better placement of mentions, better block mg…
The first step in personal knowledge management is capturing ideas outside of your head... ideal quick capture tool is frictionless and easy to adopt without disrupting your flow. Eloquent is a tool developed for learners and knowledge workers to seamlessly capture information in-context and connect it to their knowledge bases.
Subconscious is "a creative oracle that helps provoke ideas. It also captures those ideas, and remixes and resurfaces them, provoking more ideas... in a feedback loop that powers a flywheel of divergent creative thinking."Whereas spaced repetition tools like Anki "close feedback loops to help memorize facts", Subconscious will …
Watched the entirety over the last week of 2020. Highly recommended series for getting to grips with Roam, covering everything from the basic of how Roam works through to detailed HowTos on project & goal management, zettelkasten, etc. Having said that, I won't be migrating my tasks out of a dedicated task mgt tool, or pasting bibliograph…
"A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar".A "second brain" provides easy access to all the resources you've ever Liked or ideas you've ever Thought. @ExGenesis' Threadhelper brings a subset of this (just Tweets) right into the twitter UX - it looks brilliant.Check out the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
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