In tomorrow's Sunday Times, writer Steven Johnson discusses a program called DEVONthink and the general improvement in personal note-taking and idea-management assistance emerging in today's tools and user-interface advances (Tool for Thought):
But there's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated - particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them - there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.
(Note: There is no unrotting link available yet for the above article.)
As I've mentioned many times around here, the Mac program Voodoo Pad is currently the state of art for my own ad hoc, mostly text-based note-taking and mind mapping software. Blogs play a part for me as well, and I'm trying to get wiki and civicspace-style community sites going as well to provide similar knowledge accumulation for different sized groups of people (along with other communication and analytical and action-oriented services).
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