ConnectedText versus Ndxcards

Given any two elements in an outline or text, any of us could easily find _some_ way they’re connected. Manfred’s idea that connections are like reference footnotes was helpful here. But it seems to me that if you constrain your use of connections that way, they no longer occupy a central role, as seems intended in a wiki. Those who effectively uses a wiki, must have some contraining concept concept (or maybe a very well-developed sense of proportion), so they connect only what is helpful to connect, i.e. less than everything to everything else.

A milder form of this criticism can be leveled against outlines. Inspiration’s concept maps and some of the modules in Axon feature concept maps, which are stronger than outlines/mindmaps, in that you not only subordinate nodes but label them substantively.

Many of the wiki-styled critiques of outlining, it seems to me, predate the availability of outliners with cloning, which I think obviates many of these criticisms. Hierarchy is equated with “rigid hierarchy.” If I remember correctly, the Mac OS X outliners have had a difficult time introducing cloning. This was regarded as something of an accomplishment with TAO. (I could be confusing this feature with another.) On Windows, until Ultra Recall got cloning, it was rare among outline-based free form databases. These days the same functionality is often implemented with hierarchical key words, as in Idea! and Evernote.It still is not a common feature, which contributes to the perception of a radical disjunct between wiki-style connection and outlining. Cloning is absent from all of the mind-mappers I’m familiar with (what about MindManager? - I don’t know if it has cloning.)

john oconnor wrote:
> >
>Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>>The immediate recognition of common key words seems
>independent of the wicki
>>approach of CT. Is that right? In principle, a program like
>ndxcards could have a
>>feature like this. Or so it would seem
> >
>In NDXcards you would
>have to stop what you were doing and run a separate search. How likely is that going to
>happen in practice. With Connectedtext you can quickly click on a keyword link to see
>what is already connected.  The speed of seeing the connection and the ability to
>rapidly move between the connected ideas and to update them is something I would find
>useful.
> >John O’Connor

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 22, 2007 at 06:32 PM

Having dabbled with various wiki-style PIMS (the concept of which I like, but have yet to get over the hurdle of adapting to all the conventions required to use them effectively), it seems to me that there are some functional differences between wiki-style linking and cloning in an outline. In the wiki the connections are instantly visible as you are reviewing the content of the note, whereas you have to look for and search an outline to understand the context. I would also suggest, though this is just my own theory, that the connections in a wiki are more organic—that is, they arise more naturally as the content develops—than in an outline (whether or not this is a benefit probably depends upon your purpose).

Finally, a wiki allows for connections between notes without imposing a judgment about which is the superior thought or idea. That isn’t always benefit, as it is important to be able to create that kind of organization, especially when writing—which, I assume, is why CT has now added the outlining feature.

Steve Z.

Posted by Manfred
Oct 23, 2007 at 12:19 AM

“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, apear in every other subtopic.

In fact, you import 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 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 outliners. Devonthink, on th 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 (paid) version of Notetab 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 organising 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

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

Posted by sracer
Oct 23, 2007 at 02:48 AM

Manfred wrote:
>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
I never viewed outlines as an organizing principle in note-taking or writing of drafts.  One of the reasons why many DO view outlines that way probably has something to do with the lack of thought given to the design of early PIMs.  You basically had “electronic version of a paper organizer, ala Lotus Organizer and Borland’s Sidekick.  True outliners like PC-Outline came down with a fatal case of featuritis.  Feature upon feature were added to once-great outliners to the point where they were no longer outliners, but PIMs using a hierarchical structure that resembled an outline.

I view an outline as the structure… the skeleton of a document.  As the “meat is put on the bones” the outline should disappear.  Unfortunately I haven’t found any modern outliners that can do that.  They all suffer from PIMs-masquerading-as-outliners.

I’ll probably have to bite the bullet and fire up PC-Outline and get reacquainted with it.

I’ve been guilty myself of indulging in hierarchical, tree-like PIMs.  KeyNote has been invaluable and is a prime example.  But lately I’ve been tinkering with Wikidpad and find it to have the right mix of features to help ween me off outliner-style tools.

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