Re: Zoot

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3766

Posted by daly_de_gagne
2005-08-14 20:48:45

Stephen, the umbrella answer to your questions is “I don’t know,” but to leave it at that would be chintzy on my part, so….

As my posts have indicated, I am “in process” when it comes to information management.

I finally got fed up waiting for ADM to correct some of the on-going issues that impacted me with re to the development process. I love what is goingn into ADM 4; there’ll be nothing quite like it on the market. However, if those issues (and they are very minor ones, but damn annoying, and one at least persist from ADM 3)are not resolved, I will stop using it altogether. In the meantime, I use UltraRecall a lot.

This weekend, for example, I have started UR databases on spirituality, and mystery writers. These will be fed primarily from the web, and existing material I have in another UR database. I want to follow a parallel process of setting up one of these databases in InfoHandler to compare and contrast. The mystery writers database especially would benefit from user-chosen categorization such as IH offers.

InfoHandler is great, and I use it for material that I want to be able to access according to categories that I set, and not simply by virtue of an indexed search. Using IH, I can quickly see which articles deal with Freud, trauma, and his recanting due to political pressure, for example. I can do this through searches in other programs, but it is nice to see what I have laid out in the infonote tree.

My use of Zoot started on day when I was bored and decided to take a run at it. It is still a trial version; if I decide to use it I will send the Admiral a check. I think Zoot is great for situations where there’s large amounts of incoming data because of the ability to set rule for sorting the information.

Also, Atlantic correspondent Jjames Fallows, a true Zoot afficiando, has a neat template for organizing information for articles. Even without Zoot, back in the pre-coputer days when I was also a journalist, I would have been greatful just to have James’ methodology. I have hellish memories of sifting through illegible notes in old-fashioned coil steno books. Anyhow, that’s probably one of the reasons James is a major league scribe and I left the game.

I think Zoot and IH definitely have the market on user-defined categorization.

Right now, Zoot is more of a pleasing puzzle for me to work at when bored. I always feel very good when I open IH, and see exactly what I have. My hope is that Manfred will continue to develop the program, perhaps putting more emphasis on its ability to work with graphics and more directly with the web (perhaps an embedded browser and, please, let it be Firefox).

While it’s neat to say that every indexed word is a keyword—which, according to me, it is not, but simply a word that has been indexed, I feel kindn of vulnerable to use that in lieu of some kind of user-imposed categorization.

The other addition to my info management solution is NotaBene’s Ibidem; I am inputting all my professional books, using a keyword “my library,” so that I can later differentiate between what is on my shoes, and what will get dumped from PubMed and other data bases later on.

NotaBene has its own outliners, and from Graham and others have told me, it is a real writer’s outliner. I am looking forward to getting into that.

BTW, earlier this evening, I replied to a post on the ECCO group that was saying Outlook owns the PIM market. I will post a copy of that here after supper, but what I said essentially, was that while Outlook may have a commanding market share, demand for the property was heating up, and it might be better to think of Outlook renting, rather than owning.

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