Interesting Article on Organizing Information

Posted by mprazoff
Dec 14, 2015 at 01:18 AM

I posted the link to the article because I too thought its value extended well beyond Evernote. In fact, I think Evernote’s strength is to help catalogue the “dumb information,” a process the article devalues. But what software is good for the opposite: “Creating a cognitive environment that promotes creativity.”

For a few years, I journaled daily in Circus Ponies NoteBook, with each month as a separate page. The value NoteBook brought to this enterprise was that each paragraph was a separate cell. If I searched for my thoughts on DEVONthink across the year, I got only those cells discussing DEVONthink, and not the preceding cell which my have reflected how my day had gone. At the same time, I did a weekly brain dump into Curio, with each week as a separate Idea Space. At the end of the year I re-read my entries in both. I was stunned. They could have been written by two different people. While the NoteBook pages reflected primarily dominant hemisphere thinking (many technical ideas about software, for example), the Curio Idea Spaces were far more creative, reflective of thoughts about mediation, spirituality and design. Odd!

So reading the linked article reinforces for me the strengths of Curio with its ability to create graphic text, lists, mind maps, while being supported by an inbuilt ability to find appropriate web images to reinforce content. More than any program, it supports the spatial organization of information, by allowing all of these on a single Idea Space. It also supports annotation of rich text, web clips and PDF’s, a process the article also praises.

I am glad that others are also finding the article of value.