Tag: infostrats

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On 22 and 23 March, roughly in a month, the first European personal knowledge management (pkm) summit will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Over two days a varied line-up of PKM practitioners will present, show and discuss how they shqpe their personal learning and information strategies.

Personal knowledge management is enjoying a wave of renewed attention due to a new group of note making tools that has emerged in the past few years (such Roam, Logseq, Obsidian, Notion et al). But personal knowledge management is way older. People generally notice things around them, and strive to make sense of the world they live in, wether on a highly practical level or a more abstract one. The urge behind PKM therefore is deeply human. The methods and availability of tools have changed over time, as has the perspective on what constitutes personal knowledge.

Over two days a long list of well known and less well known practitioners of personal knowledge management is lined up. I had the pleasure of finding and approaching people to participate as speaker or as workshop host. This includes experienced voices like Harold Jarche. Next to invited speakers and hosts, there will be ample time on the schedule to do your own impromptu session, unconference style. The program will be shaped and finalised in the coming week or so.

The event is organised by the Dutch community ‘Digital Fitness’, and a non-profit effort. There is space for at most 200 people, and there are still tickets available. Tickets are 200 Euro for the two day event. The venue is a short walk from Utrecht Central Station, at Seats2Meet.

I hope to see you there!

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I can now share an article directly from my feed reader to my Hypothes.is account, annotated with a few remarks.

One of the things I often do when feed reading is opening some articles up in the browser with the purpose of possibly saving them to Hypothes.is for (later) annotation. You know how it goes with open tabs in browsers, hundreds will be opened up and then neglected, until you give up and quite the entire session.

My annotation of things I read starts with saving the article to Hypothes.is, and provide a single annotation for the entire page that includes a web archive link to the article and a brief motivation or some first thoughts about why I think it is of interest to me. Later I may go through the article in more detail and add more annotations, which end up in my notes. (I also do this outside of Hypothes.is, saving an entire article directly to my notes in markdown, when I don’t want to read the article in browser.)

Until now this forces me to leave my feed reader to store an article in Hypothes.is. However, in my personal feed reader I have already the opportunity to post directly from there to my websites or to my personal notes collection in Obsidian.
Hypothes.is has an API, which much like how I post to my sites from my feed reader can make it possible to directly share to Hypothes.is from inside my feed reader. This way I can continue to read, while leaving breadcrumbs in Hypothes.is (which always also end up in the inbox of my notes).

The Hypothes.is API is documented and expects JSON payloads. To read public material through the API is possible for anyone, to post you need an API key that is connected to your account (find it when logged in).

I use JSON payloads to post from my feedreader (and from inside my notes) to this site, so I copied and adapted the script to talk to the Hypotes.is API.
The result is an extremely basic and barebones script that can do only a single thing: post a page wide annotation (so no highlights, no updates etc). For now this is enough as it is precisely my usual starting point for annotation.

The script expects to receive 4 things: a URL, the title of the article, an array of tags, and my remarks. That is sent to the Hypothes.is API. In response I will get the information about the annotation I just made (ID etc.) but I disregard any response.

To the webform I use in my feedreader I added an option to send the information to Hypothes.is, rather than my websites through MicroPub, or my local notes through the filesystem. That option is what ensures the little script gets called with the right variables.

It now looks like this:


In my feed reader I have the usual form I use to post replies and bookmarks, now with an additional radio button to select ‘H.’ for Hypothes.is


Submitting the form above gets it posted to my Hypothes.is account

Bookmarked No End to Content Overload by Amit Gawande

Amit Gawande’s struggle is very recognisable, also after ditching most if not all passive consumption. There’s always more content, and its creation outpaces your intake by many orders of magnitude. In the ’00s I blogged quite a bit about information strategy, one where abundance of information is a given. Most of the information strategies and tactics I learned earlier were based on information scarcity, or at least on a scarcity of access to abundant information. That’s when I assumed information and content abundance, and that my agency lies in starting from my information needs. My agency turns overload into abundance, a switch created by a change in assumed locus of control.

When we say “I cannot keep up!“, what does ‘keeping up’ mean really? At some point I realised it was mostly an outside perspective and projection by others that I internalised. From a time where most information thrown at me was chosen by others (school e.g.). That perhaps instilled the notion that the value of information is determined by the sender. In abundance the value is in the attention I pay to selection and to the hunt for the types of surprisal I want to encounter. For many years now I’ve been practicing (and regularly failing to different extends) an inside-out perspective where my current interests and tasks determine what’s worthwile to take in.

There I see my network of peers as a large scale antenna and a filter that work because of distributed conversations taking place between us. They share with me, I share stuff with them, the feedback loops lift signals above the noise. I’ve learned to trust that if it’s important to me it will surface again, because of those feedback loops. At the very least it made me unafraid to click ‘mark all items read’ daily in applications, and treat my never diminishing unread stacks of books as an anti-library available to explore when I have an actual interest to pursue. Keeping up in such a perspective is ‘easy’, as it is my own speed that I need to keep up with and not the global firehose of everything produced under the sun. There’s no need to see it ‘all’, just enough. It keeps being a struggle though, with all media trying to keep pushing everyone’s ‘pay attention to me’ buttons.

Maybe, I need to make peace with the fact that I cannot keep up. I cannot keep up with the growing list of brilliant books. I cannot keep up with the gifted writers churning beautiful essays. And, with a heavy heart, accept that I am okay with it.

Disengaging from passive consumption has helped me. But there’s too much good content that I can’t keep up with.

Amit Gawande

In reply to [Bookmark] No End to Content Overload by Frank Meeuwsen

Inderdaad er is altijd meer materiaal dan je tot je kunt nemen. Je tip is herkenbaar, focus op de diversiteit in je eigen netwerk en op je eigen nieuwsgierigheid. Aanvullende tip: digitaal is het makkelijker heel verschillende stemmen een plek te geven in wat je tot je neemt en met wie je interacteert. Mijn via RSS gevolgde netwerk is een stuk diverser dan mijn toch cultureel en geografisch sterk bepaalde netwerk hier om me heen in Nederland.

Een tip: omring je met mensen die iets anders lezen en luisteren dan jij en praat er met elkaar over. Zo heb je een leuke dag én je leert iets nieuws.

Frank Meeuwsen

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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.

In reply to a remark by Chris Aldrich

I think the point of an anti-library is not to read it all. In that sense it is not problematic that it grows faster than one can ever read. Adding something to a personal anti-library is not an expression of the intention to read it. It’s not a ‘list of books to read’. It is a preselection of things that might be interesting to read for future you. When future you is pondering a question, or exploring a topic, they can use that as filter to actually select a few books to read. Adding to the antilibrary is preselection, picking to read from it is the actual selection. For each of those 574 books you preselected Chris, do you write down why you think they’re interesting? Keeping the preselection arguments available to yourself cements its effect, aiding actual selection later. Since a year or two I jot down my motivation and associations with books as well as web articles I clip and save. It helps me a lot selecting things to read later on.

In looking at a target for how many books I’d like to read this year, I realize that I added 574 books to my list of book to read in 2021. At this rate, my anti-library is growing exponentially with respect to the books I’ve actually been able to read

Chris Aldrich