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Useful Article Explaining Zettelkasten
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Posted by Paul Korm
Apr 10, 2020 at 12:56 PM
I have two blocks against doing anything substantial with Roam. First, the site seems flakey. Yesterday I waited 10+ minutes, twice during the day, while the site spun that compass-thingy before loading my documents. The second is the wild pricing that has been bandied about—I do not want to dedicate time building up a dataset and then have expensive handcuffs thrown on it out of the blue. I wish the owner would get on with making the pricing final.
Luhmann wrote:
Bill,
>
>Have you tried Roam Research? I was just talking with people on the Roam
>Research forums about how great it would be to have something that
>combined the slick user interface of Note Plan or Agenda with the
>features of Roam… Curious if the new version of Note Plan looks
>anything like this?
Posted by Luhmann
Apr 10, 2020 at 01:07 PM
The site had some issues yesterday, but my understanding (from Slack) is that this is the first time anything like that happened since they went public. Also, they had recently implemented new sync measures to ensure that data didn’t get lost.
No idea about pricing, but seems difficult to say at this point.
But, regardless of what the product looks like in the end, it is a very interesting approach to managing data and I think anyone who cares deeply about these issues and spends time on these forums would probably enjoy playing with it a bit and learning how it works. It will make you see other knowledge management apps quite differently!
Posted by Robert Luke
Apr 10, 2020 at 05:17 PM
I am watching Roam quite closely now and playing with it a little bit. But am hoping that their differentiating feature of bidirectional linking is adopted by Devonthink, Bear, etc. Not being a programmer, I wonder how difficult it would be to graft onto existing code bases.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 10, 2020 at 08:08 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
I have two blocks against doing anything substantial with Roam. First,
>the site seems flakey. Yesterday I waited 10+ minutes, twice during
>the day, while the site spun that compass-thingy before loading my
>documents. The second is the wild pricing
I have the same concerns. Having a daily automatic plain text online backup to Dropbox/Google Drive that WorkFlowy and Dynalist can do would be essential before I would put any serious data into Roam.
And the pricing (even at the lower end that was suggested, $15/mo.) is wildly over the top compared to the likes of WorkFlowy and Dynalist, given what it offers. If Roam insists on those prices, there would soon be a competitor that could offer the same thing at half that price.
Luhmann wrote:
>it is a very
>interesting approach to managing data and I think anyone who cares
>deeply about these issues and spends time on these forums would probably
>enjoy playing with it a bit and learning how it works. It will make you
>see other knowledge management apps quite differently!
It is the closest an online service has come to ConnectedText so far. There are many parallels. I wish CT had progressed in that direction, but sadly it hasn’t happened.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 12, 2020 at 09:24 AM
Thanks, @Luhmann, for bringing Roam into this - yes, it’s an amazing app, I’d love to use it, but now have a firm policy in place that I won’t confide any data to an app that only exists online, no matter how good the export options are. I want my data in MY file system (even if I’ve chosen to use a Cloud-based file system!), not in somebody else’s.
We’ve made that a policy on the business level as well. Synchronisation has taken over from file serving as a valuable option for ensuring that files stay on your own machine(s). In the office, for example, we use Datto Workplace (a kind of Dropbox for business, but better than Dropbox, in my view) to synchronise files between virtual workers and our office-based LAN server. Yes, we use file serving internally (from the LAN server, because then we only have to sync a single computer in the office, rather than syncing multiple computers in the same location - a huge waste of bandwidth), but otherwise, data is synchronised everywhere.
This means we can back up these synchronised files in multiple places, too, so even if the Cloud service fails (Datto was formerly Autotask which was formerly Soonr…), we still have all our files, dating back many, many years.
That’s why I don’t use Roam, or Gingko, or any other pure online service. Control/security/reliability!
But if Roam ever produce a desktop/mobile app, I’ll be at the head of the queue…
Cheers!
Bill