Julian Elve writes about capturing notes from various sources, in response to my new little script to capture web articles directly from my feedreader into my markdown notes. I will need to reply to it more later, but to signal I’m continuing the conversation, I want to respond to one thing immediately, specifically to this bit
Hypothes.is (only just starting to play with this, but if I can’t see how I can process what I might capture with the tool, there is no point in starting down this track)
Julian Elve
I follow along with Chris Aldrich’s Hypothesis stream in RSS and it’s highly informative for me to do so. Similar to Julian I have concerns starting to use it myself, if it means adding a silo next to my regular workflow. The type of interaction and annotation I have/do with a source text I normally do locally. Unless it can be a PESOS (Post Elsewhere Syndicate to Own Site) flow, exchanging that current value of processing things locally for merely the potential for interaction and conversation is likely a bad trade-off for my learning.
Hypothesis does have an API, which offers a way forward perhaps. A few weeks ago I added at least tracking who else is annotating my blogposts to my list of things to create. Julian’s nudge maybe means reevaluating that starting point, and aiming higher to also fetch whatever annotation I might make myself (I do have Hypothesis running in my Firefox browser, despite not using it much).
It starts I think with playing with the Hypothes.is API anyway. I have a day off later this week, hopefully I can use part of it to fire up Postman and explore the Hypothes.is API.
Ton expresses his concerns about annotations in any online tool (the example is Hypothes.is) being potentially risky, if nothing else as a consumer of learning time that isn’t well integrated with his other notes:
I completely agree, especially when it comes to the decision to start using yet another annotation tool.
Although I do have some page annotations in Diigo, as much as anything that’s because the tool is already there, in my browser.
Aside from the risk that your work is sitting in someone else’s domain (the raison d’etre of Indieweb!), as I develop my understanding of what I need to do for effective sense-making, the more I have realised that simple annotations sitting isolated from my main notes are almost as useless as bookmarks which are never looked at, and a far worse return on my time.
Hence the motivation to build a tool to bring them in to my flow.