Tags, Wikis, and Zoot

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Posted by Cassius
May 16, 2011 at 11:01 PM

Before any of these existed, I thought of a two pane outliner/PIM as a document with chapter headings (in the left pane) and with an index provided by the Find function. Now, Tags, Wikis and Zoot all provide means of linking items within a document, although different software using Tags and Wikis might implement the linking in different ways and with different capabilities.

Perhaps a discussion of these capabilities and people’s preferred software would be interesting.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 17, 2011 at 02:46 PM

I’m not a big fan of Tags as a primary method of organization. The first tab-oriented application I tried was Personal Knowbase (although they call them keywords). I found that my list of keywords always seemed longer than my list of notes. Subsequently, I’ve come to think it requires too much time and pre-cognition on my part as I create a note to figure out all the ways the item could be tagged. I don’t know what a year from now will make sense when it is time to hunt up that item.

For instance, if I save an article about a team of archaeologists from Acme University headed by Dr. Newman who have uncovered a new Neanderthal site in the French Alps, should the tags be archaeology, anthropology, science, France, Dr. Newman, Acme University, Neanderthal, pre-historic man, or what?

As a supplement, tags are useful to me. If, for instance, I’m working on a project and I know that the information can be broken down into four or five categories, I will use tags in that instance. Or, I find tags useful for designating certain limited attributes, such as “urgent” or “follow-up.”

Overall, however, tagging seems to me to be too unwieldy for organizing a great deal of information over a long period of time. And, since most applications have pretty good search functions, extensive tagging just seems redundant.

Wiki linking excited me for a while, but I could never quite get it to work for me as a major organizational tool. For one thing, you generally can’t get a good overview of how your information is organized this way, though ConnectedText and WikidPad each have a tree-like view. I do find creating links this way useful as a navigation assist.

Steve

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 17, 2011 at 09:04 PM

I also appreciate structure, whether it is built top-down (e.g. 2-pane outliner approach) or bottom-up (e.g. Brainstorm or corkboard approach). However, in recent years I have come to appreciate tags and internal links as complementary organisation tools.

- I started using tags in Evernote, which offers no alternative for organising information items, beyond its notebook/stack (2 level) approach. Along the way, I created an intricate tag tree which I now use in other software as well. In practice, I believe one should be able to achieve the same effects with a folder approach, as long as the software supports clones, i.e. the same information item appearing in several folders. This bypasses the “bat problem” in classifying the real world.

- Linking information items with each other (Personal Brain like) is something I find quite useful when expanding a concept.

At the end of the day, it would be great if I could have all these tools available to use depending on the context. There’s not much software that provides them all, but I can think of at least a few, namely Surfulater, UltraRecall and Zoot (?)

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