Today I came to the realisation that my ‘x years ago on this day you blogged…‘ widget is a great way to every day do a recap of those postings and capture the ideas in it in my notes. In a year it would mean all readily apparant ideas mentioned here since 2002 would be included in my notes as well as their interconnectedness, in two years it would mean I’d have had a second iteration on it.
I also realised that after a year (or two), having processed my blog that way, I could do the same thing on the thus emerging collection of notes themselves, as I have a way of surfacing all notes from e.g. July 12th in any given year.
This is akin to how I am my own blog’s most intensive reader already, reading back and forth, following links etc. But it could now be aimed at capturing some of that in a different form than the blog’s timeline.
Probably I could do the same for my existing Evernote collection, although I suspect it would be much less fruitful. My blog is my own writing, output resulting from my own thinking, doing and curation. A large chunk of my Evernote is a snippet collection from around the web without much context. Except for elements I already marked during note taking for action or as ideas, those would be easily findable.
Peter Rukavina mentioned this note on ruk.ca.
That makes me think that a possibly-helpful Obsidian plugin would grab the “x years ago today” bloated from an RSS feed and insert them as Markdown.
I think I rather do that manually. What I’m trying to get at is the ideas in those postings, not the postings per se. And then enter the separate ideas into separate notes. This morning I processed a posting on ‘open data works in triangles’ resulting in a range of notes, on microcontent, on Jyri’s objects of sociality, on how open data is an object of sociality, on how social software works in triangles, on pivots in information paths, and how it all ties to designing information strategies. Not all my postings will be as rich, but teasing all that out is the work I am looking for, not so much the archiving of material itself.
Ton Zijlstra mentioned this note on zylstra.org.