8 reactions on “On Wikis, Blogs and Note Taking”

1. Really great to read your thoughts on this, Ton! 15+ years is a lot of experience. I also came across a post from Lilia Efimova related to the wiki/blog combo from a BlogWalk salon from 2004(!) – My dream wiki/weblog tool.

   I feel both hemmed in by how my blog in its setup puts flow above stock, and how a wiki assumes stock more than flow.

   I think you are right and that perhaps we are restricted by thinking about this in terms of wikis and blogs, because there is a lot of preconceptions associated with each of those. Perhaps thinking at the level of values/requirements, about something which can help us produce both stock and flow, can help us think about the process first, and then later comes the thinking about what tool or combo of tools can support us with that.

   I often struggle with the assumed path of small elements to slightly more reworked content to articles.

   I really like the ideas of patterns, constellations, Gestalts. Constellations is naturally quite close to the idea of connecting the dots! For my wikiblog to help me learn and grow my ideas, it definitely needs to help me see these constellations. I do sometimes wonder about the merits of making every concept as small as possible. Perhaps in the right context, yes, but I don’t feel that doing it dogmatically will always be helpful.

   visualisations may point to novel constellations for me, emerging from the collection and jumble of stuff in the wiki. That I think is powerful.

   I am hoping to explore a bit more how some of the mapping and bi-directional links in org-roam might help me with this.
   Perhaps the ultimate requirement is for something that helps us see the constellations of our thoughts? I think for me this will be part stream (for sharing/receiving ideas from others), part note-taking tool, part garden, part visualisation.
   Plus plenty of staring out of the window, away from tools!

2. @ton what a small world, I was actually at that IndieWeb meetup about wikis & blogs last week (I’m Hibs), it’s what sparked my current renewed interest in wikis!One of the things I noticed you mention a few times in your post is the idea of combining bookmarking and wikis, which is the train of thought I’m now exploring, along with the idea of visualizing the relationships between wiki nodes (what you called a constellation). I’m trying to decide what that would look like for me.

3. Based on a useful suggestion by Sarah Hibner during the IndieWeb conversation on blogs and wikis (my notes), I have now added ‘last edited’ dates to my pseudo wiki built from WP pages.

4. Last week I joined an IndieWeb conversation on blogs and wikis. I ended up with three take-aways. One of them was a tip by another participant to keep a day log as a means to add more to the wiki, do more wiki gardening. Writing a list of things you do during the day as you go along, you can then use as a starting point for wiki pages to create or blogposts to write.
   This past week on my personal WordPress instance run locally on my laptop I started doing that, and have done every day the past 7 days. During the day I would add bullet points of things I did, thought or that stood out to me in some way.
   Immediately I noticed how the act of writing these things down made it easier for me to write a bit more extensively and put it online or in the wiki. Things that normally after a few hours would fall of my radar now got logged and prompted a posting later on. An experiment that worked well for me this past week, and I’ll try to keep doing it.
   When I start in the morning, I open up a new post and create a bullet list. At the end of the day it will look something like below. You can see where I linked to something that I wrote in the blog or wiki as a result of listing it in the Day Log.
   

5. With now 7 weeks at home, I this weekend fought the feeling I somehow should have been more productive in the past almost two months. To a certain extent that is true. First as now the deadline for a big piece of writing is starting to loom large, and if I don’t get up to speed now it will be problematic. Second, as for another project I still haven’t finished creating things I had expected to have had finished before this lock down even started. The core sentiment is, where have those 7 weeks gone? I take solace in the fact I’m observing I’m definitely not the only one having this feeling.

   Monday was King’s Day and a national holiday, so didn’t work other than some reflection
   Worked 2 days on a provincial project, including topics like circular economy, strategic knowledge management
   Made 2 walks with E and Y, realising I’ve been cooped up too much
   Had a board meeting of the Open State Foundation, that I chair
   Had a management team meeting of my company. A.o. decided not to make use of the government support measures for businesses.
   Had a call with the EC on our progress on the EU High Value Data lists, that are part of the new EU open data regulations
   Spent a day with Y
   Ordered, received and read (twice) a book (link in Dutch) by my friend Danny about the Enschede fireworks disaster that is now 20 years ago (which killed 23, wounded a thousand, and destroyed several hundreds of houses, right in the heart of our city). Danny as a freelance reporter made the footage that went around the world, his colleague Marcel died in the blast. I was one of two friends who phoned Danny with a tip about the fire that led to the blasts. His now published diary notes from then were a time capsule, that, because I figure quite a bit in his notes, surfaced old emotions and led me to reflecting on my own memories from that bizarre event and its aftermath.
   Based on last week’s conversation on wikis, in the past 7 days I kept day logs in my laptop based blog, as a jumping off point for wikifying and blogging material. That worked surprisingly well for me.
   Enjoyed our walks around our water rich neighbourhood, under what we call ‘Dutch skies’ (blue skies with large cloud formations, often featuring in paintings by old masters)
   
   
   
   

6. For a moment I was tempted to install NextCloud on my laptop today, on a whim to see if I could use a local instance for note taking. Both as a step away from Evernote, as well as to strengthen my digital garden. Then I checked myself, and realised I need to think about my process and needs first, not think in terms of tools. Over the past weeks exploring posts and discussions about note taking and digital gardening, I noticed how much of it is focused on tools, and how little on envisioned or existing workflow, process or intended effect.
   So I should take my own advice in the first of three follow-ups in a recent conversation on wikis, and look at my information strategy first. Starting from this 2005 image and posting about filtering:

   If after such an exercise I conclude that running a local (non-cloud) instance of NextCloud makes sense, it will be early enough to install it.

7. In this next part looking at my use of Obsidian I want to describe in more detail what notes I take and how I take them.
   Taking better notes is the actual reason I started using Obsidian. Using Obsidian for my work, day logs, and task management came later, and that covers the hierarchical part of my PKM system. The note taking part is the networked part of it. The system works for me because it combines those two things and has them interact: My internal dialogue is all about connected ideas and factoids, whereas doing activities and completing projects is more hierarchical in structure.
   I make four types of notes: Notions, Notes, Ideas and work notes.
   That last type, work notes, are the project and task related notes. Things I write down during meetings, notes from interviews, or ideas on how to move forward in a project. These live in the hierarchical structure I described in Pt 2. They can be linked to Ideas, Notes or Notions, or may give rise to them, but they serve a purpose firmly rooted in ongoing work. They are always placed within the context, and folder, of a specific project. This post isn’t about those notes.
   The other notes live in the non-hierarchical, networked part of my system. They are added as I go along based on things I think about and information I come across. They become part of the system and get context not by the folder they are placed in (as is the case with work notes in a project folder), they become part of the system because they get linked to existing notes that I associate them with. They are never not linked to at least one other note. The links over time form patterns, and emergent patterns lead to new insights. Those new insights get expressed in additional links and in new notes.
   These networked type notes come in three shapes, Notions, Notes, and Ideas. Each has their own folder to keep them separated from other material.
   The folders are named Garden of the Forking Paths (for Notions), Notes (which I may yet rename), and the Ideas-greenhouse. I will discuss them one by one.
   Ideas-greenhouse
   The ideas-greenhouse holds ideas I have, ideas that seem like something that can be put to action more or less quickly. They may be connected to notes in the other two folders, or to notes in the project folders. An example would be, that I jotted down the idea of making a digital garden for my company two months ago, triggered by a posting on how a community should have its governance documented in combination with having reread the communication handbook of Basecamp while thinking about remote working. It has since morphed into building a collective memory, and turned into a budding internal website documenting the first few things. This is useful when we are onboarding new people, and as a reference for all of us, so colleagues feel better equiped to decide something on their own or ask better questions if they do need someone else’s advice on a decision. So the ideas greenhouse contains ideas that can be acted upon after some tweaks. They may be refined over time, before such action, or connected to and recombined with other ideas in the greenhouse.
   Notes
   Notes, things I come across that strike me as interesting (filtered by my current favourite topics, but not exclusive to it, to aid serendipity), which I jot down while adding why I find it of interest. They’re more like general resources, in which I can keep/find examples, quotes or pointers, extended with some notes on what I think of them. Notes are things that may result from work notes (something someone said in a meeting, an example held up), or from feed reading (pointers to things, perspectives found in someone else’s blog), regular browsing and reading, or questions that I come up with. It’s a mix of stuff, and that’s why it still is called simply ‘Notes’. I may yet come up with a different name for them. An example would be a note I made last week, called SensRnet. SensRnet is the attempt at creating a national database of sensors placed in publice spaces, by local and national government entities. It came up in a meeting with a client. I jotted it down, adding a few links to its source code on GitHub published by the Dutch Cadastre, and links to articles written by some local governments about it. I also mention the outcome of a project my colleague Marc did a few years ago writing local regulations governing the placement of such sensors in public spaces, and doing an analysis from the legal viewpoint. That’s how a Note starts. I may copy some text into at some point, and summarise it over time, or add other context in which I encountered the same thing again. Notes are ‘factoid’ like, resources written down with the context added of how I found them and why I was interested. That’s different from Notions which are already at creation more about the future use it may have.
   Notions and proto-notions
   Notions are conceptual notes taken from my own work and experience mostly, and give my own perspective on these concepts. Most of the current well over 500 come directly in my own words from my blogposts of the past 18 years and presentations I gave during that time.
   As they are more conceptual than factual I started calling them Notions to distinguish them from the other more general resource Notes. I keep these Notions in a folder called Garden of the Forking Paths (see the name explained)
   Each Notion links to at least one other Notion, and while I write them I think about how what I am writing connects to other things already in the Garden of the Forking Paths (GotFP). I may also add additional links or tags, as I come across a Notion while pursuing something else.
   Usually while writing a Notion, I show the graph of how it connects to other Notions/Notes alongside it. I set the graph to show not only the 1st level links, as that only shows the links already apparent from the text I have in front of me. I set it to show 3 steps out at the start, and reduce to two steps when there are more links. That way you see the entire vicinity of a Notion, and it may trigger additional perspectives and associations. It’s a way to leverage the ‘weak ties’ between Notions, which is the place where new information generally comes from.
   Below you see two graphs for a Notion called ‘3D to navigate information’, gleaned from a 2006 blogpost I wrote. The first image is the graph for direct links, showing two links. The second image is the graph for a distance of 2 (links of links), and it shows a much wider picture. It may well be that seeing that graph being created alongside a Notion while I am writing it, leads to adding in another link.
   The Notion ‘3D to navigate information’ is linked to two others, one on how the physical and information landscape overlap and correlate, and one about what I think would be useful functionality for social software tools.

   If you look at the same graph with distance 2, the layer of additionally visible nodes show how my new Notion might be connected to things like online identity, using the environment to store memory and layered access to information. This triggers additional thoughts during the writing process.

   I spin out notes and potential Notions from my project notes, as I encounter things in my work where some idea or thought jumps out. Those potential Notions I put in a folder called proto notions, inside my GotFP.
   Processing notes and proto-notions
   Both the notes and proto-notions I touch upon every now and then, further summarising them or adding explanation and perspective, rewording them, linking them to other notes (this is what Tiago Forte calls progressive summarising). Proto-notions may yet become Notes and not evolve into Notions. Some of what starts as a Note may become a Notion in the GotFP, but most will always remain notes. Most ‘factoids’, even if reworded and put into the context of why I find them interesting will always be Notes. Notions usually are about concepts pertaining to vision, values and practices. Linking them is a key part of those concepts, as it binds them into my network of concepts and thoughts, it puts them as atoms into the constellations that make up my perspective of things. Notes can be specific examples of Notions.
   I previously described how I use certain tags and referencing and naming conventions for Notes and Notions.
   Using Notions and Notes
   I use Notions and Notes in my work directly, pulling them into project notes, by transclusion, or e.g. when writing project proposals. I regularly call them up in conversations when something related gets being discussed, so I can re-use parts of them.
   I also use Notions to create new blogposts and presentations. Last month I gave two presentations which were entirely created from collating a few Notions and adding a line or two to have them flow over into each other. One was on government core (base) registers, the other on Ethics as a Practice. Two months ago I blogged about how I see the role of cities, and that too was constructed from Notions.
   Next to actual output, I pull together Notions, and sometimes Notes in what I call ’emergent outlines’ (Söhnke Ahrens in his book about Zettelkasten calls them speculative outlines, I like emergence better than speculation as a term). These are brief lists to which I add Notions that I think together flow into a story. As I use transclusion I can read them using the underlying Notions. Emergent outlines are a lightweight and bottom-up way to write more, that has a much lower threshold than thinking up a writing project and sitting down trying to write it out.
   Feedreading and Notes / Notions
   Feedreading is a source for Notes, sporadically for Notions. I notice a rising need with myself for higher quality material as input. Blog reading is conversational to me, and for a long time I’ve been content with that conversation as it is. Now I more often want to look into things more deeply. A blog conversation is no longer mostly the endpoint and more frequently the starting point for an exploration, leading me down a trail of links deeper into a topic. In the past three months I’ve read more scientific articles than in the past 3 years I think. Scientific articles and other documents I keep in Zotero, and from my notes I reference the Zotero entry. This difference in how I perceive my feed reading will likely shift my focus to how to read those feeds much more ‘inside-out’, i.e. starting from a question or topic, and checking what specific people in my blogroll say about them. This is funcionality more or less missing from feed readers, so it may lead me to want to tinker some more.
   This concludes the 4th part of describing how I use Obsidian. There’s one more coming, which is all about Obsidian’s functionality as a viewer on my markdown files: the use of workspaces.

8. This page lists some things on Personal Knowledge Management. In 2020 I’m mostly focused on processing material collected through my information strategies.
   For now therefore I’m just listing some of the things I wrote recently about note taking.

   Current description of my system

   Hierarchical folder structure for Areas and Projects, description of day, week and monthlogs
   How I do task management

   Making notes and notions
   How I make ‘notions’ my permanent notes
   My 300th Notion

   Planting the Garden of Forking Paths, a bit more about the note taking process
   Second order notes, Zettelkasten
   Wiki, Blogs, Note taking
   Threading Cards and Zettelkasten
   Threading Cards

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