Calling my pile of notes a “Zettelkasten” imbues them with a cachet they don’t deserve.
@jack haha ... It is interesting to me how this is an older system that has recently gotten new life.
@terrygrier @jack Zettelkasten is the new hotness, and IMO with good reason. It promotes proactive thinking and analyzing of what you learn, instead of just keeping it for a rainy day. Kind of like my bookmark collection that I’ve gone back to no more times than I have fingers.
@pimoore I agree about the potential. For me it is about less capture and more processing and thinking. I personally dig the idea of doing it on 3x5 cards. Slower process. The issue I guess is that where will be the output? Digital (blog) and 3x5 cards provide ZERO reference back links that you can use in your writing.
@terrygrier @jack This is where digital systems like Obsidian, Craft, TiddlyWiki, et. al. come into play. Their ability to track and create backlinks easily, sets them apart from using an analogue system in terms of forming connections and generating ideas.
@pimoore @terrygrier All true. My comment was meant to poke fun at the recent tendency of aggrandizing a bunch of random notes. But my opinions of automatic backlinks has evolved also: copingmechanism.com/2021/are-...
@pimoore @jack I love seeing your TiddlyWiki - back in say ... 2001? I found it. I did not have a laptop but desktop at work and home. I put one on a USB drive and I used it for all of my personal data. I wish I still had it. I was blown away with how small the file way and how much it contained. I moved to Workflowy - and it is good. But more and more I dislike relying on a "service" vs just having a file that I use. PS. Thank you for the back link post - I have added your blog to my RSS reader.
@jack @terrygrier Great post Jack, and food for thought! Perhaps the solution is to keep two note systems in order to separate those where backlinks being automatically applied would be more useful?
@terrygrier Yeah, I really like the permanence and portability of TiddlyWiki. And anyone can just click the save button on my public wiki and it'll download the whole thing (except linked images) in one HTML file. Hard to beat.
