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"designing a personal knowledgebase"
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Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 6, 2014 at 11:19 PM
jimspoon wrote:
>DrAndus - as I read the article I was wondering how well ConnectedText
>would fit the ideal “personal knowledge base” the author was describing.
> I would be interested to know what you would think about it. I am not
>a CT user, but was experimenting with it last night.
Well, I’ve gone through a very similar process of searching for the ideal PBK on the very pages of this forum here a few years ago, and as you know I found it in CT. But I haven’t tried any of the Mac software discussed on that blog, so I can’t draw any comparisons. But I would still suggest checking out CT to Alex. There are plenty of Mac users using it via Parallels etc. very happily. Moreover, many of the general weaknesses of web-based wikis mentioned in the blog post and comments do not apply to CT, as it is a lot more than just a wiki. It has all kinds of analytical, visualisation, and organisational tools that plain vanilla wikis just don’t have.
I wouldn’t say it ticks every single box on Alex’s list, but I don’t know of any single software that could. On the other hand, some workarounds do exist, such as using Autohotkey and Python scripts for instance to semi-automate certain processes (such as capture and input).
Paul Korm wrote:
>But, no matter what the solution, there’s eventually time needed to
>“peck away” and curate one’s collection of information. CT can be
>highly functional with very little investment.
I completely agree. Certain analytical tasks and decisions just can’t be automated, especially not the decision on what to include and exclude or how to categorise and tag the data. CT, being a wiki with markup, may end up a bit fiddly at times, but one can reap the benefits later, when running queries and finding info easily and being able to make new connections.
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 11, 2014 at 12:01 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
>Same here ... reading Alex’s essay I kept thinking “ConnectedText”.
Actually the whole category of Zettelkasten software is focused on this problem of creating and managing a personal knowledge base, so some of the other software on this list may also be of relevance:
http://www.zettelkasten.de/tools/
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5298/0/zettelkasten-software