Submitted for your consideration

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 17, 2012 at 06:20 PM

Greetings,

So, taking up the challenge of creating a taxonomy for “outliners,” I’ve done a little sketching and thinking in Tinderbox and come up with a little theory.

First of all, let me propose that our favorite type of program has two major attributes: 1. the main purpose of the program; and 2. the main organizational scheme. And each of these has two major options, as follows:

1. Purpose
A. Collecting information from other sources (clipping from the web, storing PDFs, note-taking, etc…)
B. Creating information/knowledge from ourselves (brainstorming, thinking, outlining, writing, etc…)

2. Organization
C. Topic-based organization (typical topic hierarchies)
D. Search-based organization (tagging, text indexing)

Now, I’m not suggesting that any application focuses exclusively on one organization type necessarily, and I’m sure most app developers would insist that their software can both collect and create. What I am suggesting is that each application can be categorized generally as an AC, AD, BC, BD based on what it does best. For example, Evernote would be an AD application because it excels at collecting information and its primary organizational structure is tagging.

Given this (and bear with me even if you disagree totally), it is possible to create a quadrant chart where we can place applications. And I’ve done just that, at least as a beginning:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/155244/-Outliner—Taxonomy.png

Being higher or lower or to the right or to the left doesn’t necessarily mean that an application is best in that category, just that it does that in extreme. For example, Inspiration found its way to the top right of my chart (extreme create/topic), not necessarily because it is the best outliner, but because it is SO focused on creating outlines and has almost no facility (other than cut and paste) for collecting info from other sources. On the other hand, AskSam falls far to the left (i.e. extreme search) because it has a very good, quick indexed search.

I would submit that extreme topic-based creator applications are what we would call pure outliners, while extreme topic-based collector applications are hierarchical free-form databases (info trees?). I’m not sure what to call the other two quadrant apps as yet.

Anyway, I suspect there is really no benefit from having done this analysis, other than it is fun. Perhaps, however, it will generate some interesting discussion.

Steve Z.