I’ve taken copious notes in notebooks over the past 6 years, I’ve used evernote on and off as a capture tool for the past 4 years, and for the past 1.5 years I’ve been trying to organize my notes via a personal wiki. I’m in the process of switching and redesigning systems, so here’s some thoughts.
A defining idea in this space is “Your memory works my association, get your note taking to mirror that.” A simple version of this is what you have in a wiki. Every concept mentioned that has it’s own page has a link to it. I’m a big fan of graph visualizations of information, and you could imagine looking at a graph of your personal wiki where edges are links. Roam embraces links with memory, all your notes know if they’ve been linked to and display this information. My idea for a memex tool to make really interesting graphs is to basically giving you free reign to make the type system of your nodes and edges, and give your really good filtering/search capacity on that type system. Basically a dope gui/text editor overtop of neo4j.
Personal Lit review
This is one way I frame what I want to myself. Sometimes I go “Okay, I want to rethink how I orient to loose-tie friendships.” Then I remember that I’ve definitely thought about this before, but can’t remember what I thought. This is the situation where I’d want to do a “lit review” of how I’ve attacked this issue in the past, and move forward in light of my history.
Just-in-time ideation
I take a shit ton of notes. Some are notes on what I’m reading, others are random ideas for jokes, projects, theories, arm chair philosophizing. Not all ideas should be, or can be acted upon right away, or at all (like “turn Spain into a tortilla”). But there is some possible future situation where it would be useful to have this idea brought to mind. My ideal memex would actually be a genie that remembers everything I’ve thought and written, follows me around, and constantly goes, “What would be useful for Hazard to remember right now?” This can be acted on in how you design your notes. Think, “What sort of situation would it be useful to remember this in? In that situation, what key words and phrases will be in my head? Include those in this note so they’ll pop up in a search for those keywords.”
Low friction capture everything
If you get perfectionist with your notes, you lose. This frame imagines your mind as a firehose of gold, and you want to capture all of it, and sort out what’s good later. Record all ideas, no matter how crackpot. Carry a notebook, put your note taking app on your homescreen, set up your alexa to dictate notes, do whatever it takes. One principle that comes out of this frame is to be lax on hierarchy and organization. It should be as easy as possible to just capture an idea, with no regard for “where it goes”. If I have to navigate a file tree and decide where a doc/note/brainstorm goes before I’ve even gotten it out, it might die. The extreme end is NO organization, all search. Tiago doesn’t like that and suggests “no org on capture, and opportunistically organize and summarize and combine overtime”.
Put EVERYTHING in your memex
This is embraced by Andrew Louis. This is also embraced by Notion, they want to me the one app you put everything in. I don’t necessarily want on application that can do it all (text, tables, video, blah blah blah), but I DO want one memex command center where the existence of all data and files are recorded, and you can connect and interlink them. This is sorta like tagspace, they are a literally a wrapper around your file system, letting you tag, navigate, and add meta data to files for organizational purpose. I would LOVE if I had one “master file system memex”, special features for text editing, and then specific applications in charge of any more specialized functionality.
He’s been on my radar for a year, and I’ve just started reading more of his stuff. Suspicion that he might be me from the future. He’s all about the process and design of the info flow and doesn’t sell a memex tool. Big ideas: find what you need when the time is right, new organic connections, your second brain should surprise you, progressive summarization.
Andrew Louis: I’m building a memex
This guy takes the memex as a way of life. Self-proclaimed digital packrat, he’s got every chat log since highschool saved, always has his gps on and records that location, and basically pours all of his digital data into a massive personal database. He’s been developing an app for himself (partially for others) to manage and interact with this. This goes waaaaaaaay beyond note taking. I’d binge more of his stuff if I wanted to get a sense for the emergent revelations that could come from intense memexing.
Conor both has a beta-product, and many ideas about how to organize ideas. Inspired by zettlekasten (post about zettlekasten, was the name of a physical note card system used by Niklas Luhmann). Check out his white paper for the philosophy
Very cool. Mixes wiki, trello board, and graph centric views. Has all the nice content embedding, slash commands, etc. DOESN’T WORK OFFLINE :( (would be great otherwise)
Conor has been developing this with the Zettelkasten system as his inspiration. Biggest feature (in my mind) is “deep linking” things. You can link other notes to your note, and have them “expanded”, and if you edit the deep linked note in a parent note, it actual edits the linked note. Also, notes keep track of every place there mentioned. Allows for powerful spiderwebby knowledge connection. I’m playing with the beta, still getting familiar and don’t yet have much to say except that deep linking is exactly the feature I’ve always wanted and couldn’t find.
Desktop wiki that works for linux. Nothing fancy, uses a simple markdown esque syntax, everything is text files. I used that for a year, now I’m moving away. 1 reason is I want more rich outlining powers like folding, but I’m also broadly moving away from framing my notes as a “personal wiki” for reasons I’ll mention in another post.
Just a wiki software. When I first decided to use a wiki to organize my school notes, I used this. It’s an online tool which is --, but works okay as a wiki.
(what I’m currently using) Emacs is a magical extensible text editor, and org mode is a specific package for that editor. Org mode has great outlining capabilities, and unlimited possibilities for how you can customize stuff (coding required). The current thing that I’d really need for org mode to fit my needs is to be able to search my notes and see previews of them (think evernote search, you see the titles of notes, and a preview of the content). I think deft can get me this, haven’t installed yet though. Long term, it seems emacs is appealing because it seems like I can craft my own workflow with precision. Will take work though. Not recommended if you want something that “Just works”.
Have used a lot over the years. Great for capture (it’s on your phone and your desktop (but not linux [:(])). I’ve got several years of notes in there. I rarely build ideas in evernote though. This is a “works out of the box” app.
I really like the idea of a personal wiki. I’ve been thinking for a while about how I can track concepts that I like but that don’t seem to be part of the zeitgeist. I might set up a personal wiki for it!
IIRC, there is some kind of template software you can use to set up a basic wiki, kind of like how WordPress is a template software for a basic blog. If you google around you’ll probably find it, if it exists.
Memex Thread:
I’ve taken copious notes in notebooks over the past 6 years, I’ve used evernote on and off as a capture tool for the past 4 years, and for the past 1.5 years I’ve been trying to organize my notes via a personal wiki. I’m in the process of switching and redesigning systems, so here’s some thoughts.
Concepts and Frames
Association, linking and graphs
A defining idea in this space is “Your memory works my association, get your note taking to mirror that.” A simple version of this is what you have in a wiki. Every concept mentioned that has it’s own page has a link to it. I’m a big fan of graph visualizations of information, and you could imagine looking at a graph of your personal wiki where edges are links. Roam embraces links with memory, all your notes know if they’ve been linked to and display this information. My idea for a memex tool to make really interesting graphs is to basically giving you free reign to make the type system of your nodes and edges, and give your really good filtering/search capacity on that type system. Basically a dope gui/text editor overtop of neo4j.
Personal Lit review
This is one way I frame what I want to myself. Sometimes I go “Okay, I want to rethink how I orient to loose-tie friendships.” Then I remember that I’ve definitely thought about this before, but can’t remember what I thought. This is the situation where I’d want to do a “lit review” of how I’ve attacked this issue in the past, and move forward in light of my history.
Just-in-time ideation
I take a shit ton of notes. Some are notes on what I’m reading, others are random ideas for jokes, projects, theories, arm chair philosophizing. Not all ideas should be, or can be acted upon right away, or at all (like “turn Spain into a tortilla”). But there is some possible future situation where it would be useful to have this idea brought to mind. My ideal memex would actually be a genie that remembers everything I’ve thought and written, follows me around, and constantly goes, “What would be useful for Hazard to remember right now?” This can be acted on in how you design your notes. Think, “What sort of situation would it be useful to remember this in? In that situation, what key words and phrases will be in my head? Include those in this note so they’ll pop up in a search for those keywords.”
Low friction capture everything
If you get perfectionist with your notes, you lose. This frame imagines your mind as a firehose of gold, and you want to capture all of it, and sort out what’s good later. Record all ideas, no matter how crackpot. Carry a notebook, put your note taking app on your homescreen, set up your alexa to dictate notes, do whatever it takes. One principle that comes out of this frame is to be lax on hierarchy and organization. It should be as easy as possible to just capture an idea, with no regard for “where it goes”. If I have to navigate a file tree and decide where a doc/note/brainstorm goes before I’ve even gotten it out, it might die. The extreme end is NO organization, all search. Tiago doesn’t like that and suggests “no org on capture, and opportunistically organize and summarize and combine overtime”.
Put EVERYTHING in your memex
This is embraced by Andrew Louis. This is also embraced by Notion, they want to me the one app you put everything in. I don’t necessarily want on application that can do it all (text, tables, video, blah blah blah), but I DO want one memex command center where the existence of all data and files are recorded, and you can connect and interlink them. This is sorta like tagspace, they are a literally a wrapper around your file system, letting you tag, navigate, and add meta data to files for organizational purpose. I would LOVE if I had one “master file system memex”, special features for text editing, and then specific applications in charge of any more specialized functionality.
People Talking about Memex stuff
Tiago Forte: Build a Second Brain (here’s an introduction)
He’s been on my radar for a year, and I’ve just started reading more of his stuff. Suspicion that he might be me from the future. He’s all about the process and design of the info flow and doesn’t sell a memex tool. Big ideas: find what you need when the time is right, new organic connections, your second brain should surprise you, progressive summarization.
Andrew Louis: I’m building a memex
This guy takes the memex as a way of life. Self-proclaimed digital packrat, he’s got every chat log since highschool saved, always has his gps on and records that location, and basically pours all of his digital data into a massive personal database. He’s been developing an app for himself (partially for others) to manage and interact with this. This goes waaaaaaaay beyond note taking. I’d binge more of his stuff if I wanted to get a sense for the emergent revelations that could come from intense memexing.
(check out his demo vid)
Conor: Roam
Conor both has a beta-product, and many ideas about how to organize ideas. Inspired by zettlekasten (post about zettlekasten, was the name of a physical note card system used by Niklas Luhmann). Check out his white paper for the philosophy
Products I’ve interacted with
Nuclino
Very cool. Mixes wiki, trello board, and graph centric views. Has all the nice content embedding, slash commands, etc. DOESN’T WORK OFFLINE :( (would be great otherwise)
Style/Inspiration: Wiki meets trello + extra.
Roam
Conor has been developing this with the Zettelkasten system as his inspiration. Biggest feature (in my mind) is “deep linking” things. You can link other notes to your note, and have them “expanded”, and if you edit the deep linked note in a parent note, it actual edits the linked note. Also, notes keep track of every place there mentioned. Allows for powerful spiderwebby knowledge connection. I’m playing with the beta, still getting familiar and don’t yet have much to say except that deep linking is exactly the feature I’ve always wanted and couldn’t find.
Zim Wiki
Desktop wiki that works for linux. Nothing fancy, uses a simple markdown esque syntax, everything is text files. I used that for a year, now I’m moving away. 1 reason is I want more rich outlining powers like folding, but I’m also broadly moving away from framing my notes as a “personal wiki” for reasons I’ll mention in another post.
PB Wiki
Just a wiki software. When I first decided to use a wiki to organize my school notes, I used this. It’s an online tool which is --, but works okay as a wiki.
Emacs Org Mode
(what I’m currently using) Emacs is a magical extensible text editor, and org mode is a specific package for that editor. Org mode has great outlining capabilities, and unlimited possibilities for how you can customize stuff (coding required). The current thing that I’d really need for org mode to fit my needs is to be able to search my notes and see previews of them (think evernote search, you see the titles of notes, and a preview of the content). I think deft can get me this, haven’t installed yet though. Long term, it seems emacs is appealing because it seems like I can craft my own workflow with precision. Will take work though. Not recommended if you want something that “Just works”.
Evernote
Have used a lot over the years. Great for capture (it’s on your phone and your desktop (but not linux [:(])). I’ve got several years of notes in there. I rarely build ideas in evernote though. This is a “works out of the box” app.
I really like the idea of a personal wiki. I’ve been thinking for a while about how I can track concepts that I like but that don’t seem to be part of the zeitgeist. I might set up a personal wiki for it!
Yes! Thinking about it is a great idea.
Is there any particular open source software you use to set this up?
I use GitBook.com, functions very well as a personal wiki (can link to other pages, categorise, etc)
IIRC, there is some kind of template software you can use to set up a basic wiki, kind of like how WordPress is a template software for a basic blog. If you google around you’ll probably find it, if it exists.