Re: Conceptual Problem Burdens ADM 3 and Other Programs

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2326

Posted by zeoli
2004-12-06 21:25:38

Stephen,

I think I agree with your conclusions—if I understand them correctly—and would like to add a comment.

Most information database programs are built around the outline or data hierarchy. If they allow for keywords, the keywords are secondary, an additional way to categorize. In my opinion, it should be the other way around. The keywords (or categories, whatever you want to call them) assigned to a piece of data should be the primary data structure, and the outline should be a more fluid, even temporary way to organize the data for any given project. Don’t get me wrong, outlining is crucial, but it is always going to be changing depending upon how you need to use your data. Information databases built around an outline hierarchy quickly become overwhelming, in my opinion.

That said, I also am not a big fan of being forced to add keywords to every piece of data in order to find and retrieve it (this is the problem with Personal Knowbase and Literary Machine, for example). This is why I love Zoot. You never have to do any of this categorization with a piece of data… just clip it or create it, and it is easy to find and collect when you need it. At most, you just need to know WHICH database to drop it into, but even that really isn’t necessary. Zoot’s two main drawbacks are its lack of text formatting capability and its really clunky outlining. Truly, you can’t really outline with Zoot at all. However, it is easy to clip stuff from Zoot and drop it into BrainStorm. These two programs together are magnificent… except for the lack of text formatting in either.

Steve Z.

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