Stephen Z. and Graham Rind said they would share some of their uses and organisation within Personal Brain.
While I am fascinated with the product (the tabular, hierarchical outlines just don't do it for me right now) I am afraid that just dumping information into a brain will lead to redundancies and a big mess.

Anyone else with ideas or experience please jump in!

Thanks in advance for your ideas,

Susanne

If you're looking for a dumping ground, then I don't think PersonalBrain would be your best choice. For that I use Zoot.

But there are schemes for moderately using PB in this way. You can create a Thought called "In Box" and pin it to the top of the Plex, so that it is readly available. You can then dump items into the In Box as needed, but you'll want to attend to the In Box regularly to find homes for its Child Thoughts.

Here's a screenshot of how I've got "In Box" as a Jump Thought off of my Home Thought and as a pin in the upper left part of the Plex:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/155244/PB%20with%20In%20Box.jpg

You can also create a tag called "Unfiled" to identify Thoughts you don't necessary have a place for yet -- although you still have to put them somewhere.

Nevertheless, PersonalBrain definitely takes engagement with your information. As I said in my other post, I find this a plus, but it won't be for everyone.

Steve Z.

Thanks for the wealth of information you shared!

I cannot use Zoot (which I do love) for the simple reason that I am prohibited by our great and wonderful IT department from installing software on my work notebook. Zoot won't run on a stick, the brain will.
Being the CRIMPer that I am, of course I have both UltraRecall and MyInfo - UltraRecall is too slow copying Web information and can't seem to get around the microsoft dll problems for displaying documents etc. MyInfo would normally be my first choice - yeah it is tabular and hierarchical but the tagging is one of the best I have seen - however, half of the web clips come over without the graphics and messed up formatting.

Also too, I am coming to prefer the ideal of associative thinking rather than linear thinking - this is much better supported by the brain or even Wikis, such as Connected Text. My only problem with the Wikis is that they seem to have this "real men code formats" attitude - is it really such a problem to have bold, bullets etc. as word-like functions? Do I really need to enter codes in front of and after the texts - that is soooo 1980's and does not make me feel cool. - ok, sorry, rant over

Anyway, thanks again for sharing, I will certainly try out a few of these ideas as long as my trial is still going,

Susanne

I too like the idea of a personal wiki, but have yet to find one that works intuitively for me. ConnectedText is a powerful program (and can run as a portable version from a USB stick) but I've found it cumbersome for my work style to deal with the mark-up language. (And, also, for some reason Norton Anti-Virus decided it was a major threat on my computer and removed it... don't know what that was about, but didn't want to spend the time figuring it out.)

If you have any questions about PersonalBrain, I'll be glad to try to answer them.

Steve Z.

Susanne, much as I like MyInfo, it is not a good program for dealing with web clips.

I prefer Surfulater. I've stopped using Evernote since I found I can sync Surfulater between two computers by way of Dropbox.

I've also been testing Springpad. I like, except for fact I've discovered it only displays a short form of urls, which is a bit of a pain if you need to cite your source.

Thanks to a Bits du Jour special I rediscovered - and bought - ClipCache this week. It does a great job of saving anything and everything by using the Windows clipboard.

And I agree with you re wikis. I tend to feel they are over-rated, but that may just because I don't "get" them.

I am convinced I could find Connected Text useful, but its like a foreign language to me. I won't say more about it because last time I complained about it being incomprehensible to me, one the members here whom I had especially respected, threw a hissy fit at my response to his favourite piece of software, and resigned from this list, never to be heard from again.

Oh well.

And in good CRIMPing style, I bought The Journal today at half price from Bits du Jour.

But The Brain is starting to look good - but I'm not going there, at least not today.

Cheers,

Daly

Susanne wrote:

Thanks for the wealth of information you shared!

I cannot use Zoot (which I do love)
for the simple reason that I am prohibited by our great and wonderful IT department
from installing software on my work notebook. Zoot won't run on a stick, the brain
will.
Being the CRIMPer that I am, of course I have both UltraRecall and MyInfo -
UltraRecall is too slow copying Web information and can't seem to get around the
microsoft dll problems for displaying documents etc. MyInfo would normally be my
first choice - yeah it is tabular and hierarchical but the tagging is one of the best I
have seen - however, half of the web clips come over without the graphics and messed up
formatting.

Also too, I am coming to prefer the ideal of associative thinking
rather than linear thinking - this is much better supported by the brain or even Wikis,
such as Connected Text. My only problem with the Wikis is that they seem to have this
"real men code formats" attitude - is it really such a problem to have bold, bullets
etc. as word-like functions? Do I really need to enter codes in front of and after the
texts - that is soooo 1980's and does not make me feel cool. - ok, sorry, rant
over

Anyway, thanks again for sharing, I will certainly try out a few of these ideas
as long as my trial is still going,

Susanne

Just to reiterate my findings about Personal Brain from the other thread:

- Having a lot of thoughts does not have any significant effect on performance that I have noticed. I have a glossary, for example, with >6500 thoughts, without any noticeable slowing down.
- Where there is a limit is in the size of the notes within each thought. In one of my brains I have notes which may contain >30 graphic-heavy pages. Working with these, and saving them, grinds to a halt at a certain point. For those chapters I have to use the data as an attachment instead of putting it into a note.

and to add:

- The number of brains you use is dependent upon why you're using Personal Brain. Unlike Stephen I find more brains better because I am using one brain per web resource being created. (An example is the free Data Quality glossary at http://www.dqglossary.com
- As Stephen said, you can't just dump information into the Brain. You need to have some idea of a structure before you start. But if your structure is not working for you it can be changed, and the search function is very strong. I have my customer database unstructured in The Brain because I can find what I'm looking for just using the search.

The main reasons why I use Personal Brain mainly for web sites and not for information management is that the Brain provides notes and links to other resources (such as spreadsheets and web pages) which need to be opened in their native programs to be viewed. I like to see everything at once, so I use OneNote where I can print everything into it and rarely need to add a link to an external resource. I have tried to use The Brain for other things, but I reached the point some years ago that I stopped looking for a one programme fits all and used many programs, each to its own strength.

That's it, really!

Graham

Personally, I've never been able to find a use for Personal Brain. It slows to a crawl if you put a lot of text and images in the notes, so you can't use it as a full-blown personal information manager, and it's overkill for basic mind-mapping and brainstorming. I like the Brain interface a lot, but eventually mothballed the program when I realized that I was just using it to create huge webs of hyperlinks with brief attached notes. Basically, I was using it as a document and hyperlink management system, something I don't really need. It's more efficient to manage hyperlinks as bookmarks in your browser and use Windows Explorer (which is itself a document management system) to manage files. I do like the Brain, though. I just wish I could find a use for it.

Thanks to everyone who shared their ideas and tips, I have been trying out a few of these methods and am coming to agree that TheBrain is NOT the place to just dump information.

What I think it can do very well is to capture and manipulate ideas, snips, and "thoughts" very quickly. Something that I could definitely use at work - the only question is whether I am prepared to shell out that kind of money for the pro version on my own - sadly, I am leaning towards no. Because it's cool is not a reason to spend 250$.

Because of the installation problems at work, great programs like Zoot and Surfulater and even MyBase are out of the question - so, I will probably stick with Evernote for dumping things and MyInfo for the (semi-)structured stuff.

@Quant: my beef with UR is not the .5 seconds it takes for the web capture, but the fact that one of the really cool things about UR is exactly the ability to view different kinds of information from within UR - so, when every mistaken click on a Text Item leads to the slow opening of word, then the message that the format is not recognized and I have to click "rtf" then it starts again to show me an empty page - we are no longer talking about .5 or even 1 second, but 5-10. Go through that 10 times a day and you will know what I mean.

And, also too, I LIKE crimping - hope springs eternal, a modern form of quests and all that
though in the end, I usually wind up with my steady group of Zoot, Evernote and MyInfo ;-)
Susanne

Here's a snippet from a thread on the Personal Brain forums ('Types/Tags and Parent thoughts' is the thread if anyone is interested):

"There are multiple uses for PB even though they are closely related:

managing information (obvious)
managing actions and projects
brainstorming and doing mindmaps and diagrams (actually covers almost all of my needs in this area)

The reason why I want to distinguish those uses is that I've found that it's best to approach them differently."

I think this is pretty perceptive. I own a copy which I have not put to much use as of yet. At first I was inclined to use it as a replacement file explorer and bookmark manager and it didn't take long to see it wasn't worth the effort. But I've been thinking about using it more for tying short notes together and more recently I've been considering using it to manage my personal and work, projects and actions. There's a long GTD thread in thebrain forums. The last two pages are particularly good and anyone interested in using PB for task management would likely find them worthwhile.

I always have PB running as I find it the most rapid way to capture information and put it into categorized places where I can find it later, I use it for short note taking on the fly, capturing web links, and the search function is truly outstanding. The thing about PB is that it takes some time and patience to understand - it is extremely powerful but much of the power is in search and select functions, reorienting the home node, and custom and expanded views. I think it could use more output format capabilities, and it would truly benefit from a capture tool like the TopicScape Box that allows you to put items (including MHT captures of web pages) into a holding box that you can later place into the Topicscape at leisure - PB requires you to preselect the node you want to dump things into. I love TopicScape 3D and it is more powerful than PB, but just can't quite bond with it like I have with PB.