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Interesting Article on Organizing Information
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Posted by WSP
Dec 13, 2015 at 06:04 PM
Doesn’t OneNote do all of these things in Steve’s list—more or less?
——————————————-
1. An excellent editor.
2. The ability to annotate the text in a number of ways.
3. A facility to save versions of the information—you might want to refer to the original or see how your thinking about it evolved.
4. Quick and easy browsing of information so you can make those unexpected connections—if you have to search for it, that means you are expecting them.
Posted by rogbar
Dec 13, 2015 at 08:44 PM
DevonThink.
Posted by mprazoff
Dec 14, 2015 at 01:18 AM
I posted the link to the article because I too thought its value extended well beyond Evernote. In fact, I think Evernote’s strength is to help catalogue the “dumb information,” a process the article devalues. But what software is good for the opposite: “Creating a cognitive environment that promotes creativity.”
For a few years, I journaled daily in Circus Ponies NoteBook, with each month as a separate page. The value NoteBook brought to this enterprise was that each paragraph was a separate cell. If I searched for my thoughts on DEVONthink across the year, I got only those cells discussing DEVONthink, and not the preceding cell which my have reflected how my day had gone. At the same time, I did a weekly brain dump into Curio, with each week as a separate Idea Space. At the end of the year I re-read my entries in both. I was stunned. They could have been written by two different people. While the NoteBook pages reflected primarily dominant hemisphere thinking (many technical ideas about software, for example), the Curio Idea Spaces were far more creative, reflective of thoughts about mediation, spirituality and design. Odd!
So reading the linked article reinforces for me the strengths of Curio with its ability to create graphic text, lists, mind maps, while being supported by an inbuilt ability to find appropriate web images to reinforce content. More than any program, it supports the spatial organization of information, by allowing all of these on a single Idea Space. It also supports annotation of rich text, web clips and PDF’s, a process the article also praises.
I am glad that others are also finding the article of value.
Posted by PIMfan
Dec 17, 2015 at 06:56 PM
A very interesting read - thanks for providing this.
As I read through it and focus in particular on the position on tagging content, I found myself in agreement with the position the author took. My biggest challenge with tagging is that while I may tag something, I don’t always later on recall why I tagged it the way I did (note: I tend not to use obvious tags like “Reviews”, “Vendors”, etc.). Who knows - maybe old age is to blame. But overall, I find most tagging solutions to not work effectively for me.
What I found ironic was the article was posted on Evernote’s site, and I consider the no-longer-supported desktop Evernote 2.2 to posses one of the most effective tagging solutions I’ve ever encountered. Interestingly, the approach Evernote 2.2 offered specifically avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional tagging as noted in the article. For those that may not be familiar with it, Evernote 2.2 tagging worked as follows:
1) Create a tag
2) Specify keywords and conditions that will result in an item being tagged (keywords, location, etc).
3) Enable the tag rule.
After setting up a few tag rules using the above, the real magic would start to happen. Each new item that was added would have the tag rules applied and the appropriate tag applied. What was special was that there was a dynamic tag hierarchy created and displayed that let you explore related items that you might not have even known existed. Because tags were dynamically assigned based on rules and not hard-coded on items, the tag hierarchy represented a living “relationship engine”. It was an incredibly powerful function, and was unfortunately deprecated once the Evernote 2.2 app (still available but no longer supported) was shut down in favor of their current tool approach. The user forum screamed when this feature was removed from Evernote 3, and they lost many aficionados (me included). Zoot has a somewhat similar assignment rules engine, but without the elegancy of the dynamic content tag hierarchy feature. I’ve yet to find another tool that has the features, speed and flexibility of the Evernote 2.2 tagging system.
How ironic to find - hosted on Evernote - an article that disparages static tagging….. when they originally had a solution that addresses many of the issues noted in the article….