Best personal information, knowledge and idea manager software?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 6, 2013 at 11:03 PM

Notbalok, welcome to the forum.

In my opinion your question is a bit too general and can be answered only subjectively. First of all, one has to differentiate between information _collection_ (e.g. from a browser) and idea/knowledge _generation_ and organisation; the two require very different features. I personally don’t think that there’s any software that excels in both.

Some thoughts:

- Many information managers provide plug-ins for popular browsers, facilitating information collection: Evernote, MyBase, MyInfo, Surfulater, UltraRecall to name but a few. Even some more ‘idea-oriented’ programs like MindManager provide such a feature. The results of plug-ins vary widely, so depending on whether the faithful copying of web pages is important for you or not, your choice may vary. I am personally mostly interested in the textual content, which most tools have no trouble capturing.

- ‘Knowledge’ managers differ greatly on the underlying ‘model’ of knowledge organisation: outlines / mindmaps, networks, hypertext (wikis), tables… The choice usually reflects the user’s own perception of reality.

- Sometimes, simpler is better: quick capture and access to information, or seamless noting down of ideas may be more important than extensive organisation with keywords, folders etc. It is for me, so I’ve chosen accordingly, i.e. Evernote for the former and Brainsorm for the latter, though there’s a lot of features I miss in both.