ConnectedText versus Ndxcards

Posted by Manfred
Oct 23, 2007 at 12:26 AM

I am sorry to have to post this again, but there are some typos that I just have to correct (never see all of them before posting):

“everything is connected to everything” in a wiki

Well, not necessarily. You can connect everything to everything, but that would make the connections meaningless. It would be the equivalent of having every sub-topic in a branch of the outline, appear in every other sub-topic.

In fact, you impart meaning on the information by selectively connecting things. Novices always ask for “automatic linking” or the idea that every topic refers to every topic in the whole database.

Let’s say you have one topic called “flowers” and it contains the word “rose”, you can chose to make a link to “rose” (or closer to my practice: you are writing in the topic about flowers, and then want to talk about roses; you could go on and talk about roses in the topic, but you make the decision to write about roses in a separate topic, make a wiki-link and then go on to write about it.) Now you don’t want every topic that contains the word “rose” or “Rose” to link to that topic, if only because you may also have an acquaintance called “Rose” who has nothing to do with roses, etc., etc.

I don’t understand what “undirected link” means either. In the example there is a direction from Flowers to roses (or, in this case, from general to particular). You can also link back from rose to Flowers (or you could assign the category “flower” to the topic of roses, primroses, etc., and have these topics automatically listed in the topic flower).

I agree that the kind of search that leads to noticing communality is independent of wikis. Devonthink on the Mac is an outliner.

You might even say that the kind of easy linking that characterizes wikis can be combined with outliners (Wikidpad is an attempt at doing that; and even the Notetab (paid version) allows you to enclose a word with square brackets and have it refer to another document with that name; so does Jotplus - though neither one allows you easily to create a new topic by making such a link. I remember having asked the developer of Jotplus for this capability a long time ago [before ConnectedText, that is], but it was never implemented. The same is true of The Journal.)

But I have come to believe that Outlines should not be the basic or primary organizing principle in note-taking and writing of drafts. I write, come upon another idea, and create a new entry for that idea; concentrate on that idea, and if it leads to something else, voila ... I enclose the word with double square brackets and there is another topic.It’s a bit like Brainstorm that way.

Later I can worry about how it may fit in the larger picture. And I can make an outline at this point.

Hoping this helps,
Manfred