Tag: notemaking

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I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit.

One title, From The Winter Archives, stood out to me. Being primed with thoughts of personal knowledge management and note making, I approached the title from that angle. The book, originally titled Fra vinterarkivene, is a 2015 novel by Norwegian writer Merethe Lindstrøm, and completely unconnected to such associations on PKM.

Five years ago Robin Sloan blogged about how newsletters should have seasons, and I blogged about it in response in more general terms, looking at seasons for any creative output. As were are moving from winter to spring, I was also reminded about the different tasks that come with the change of seasons around the house. Disconnecting the water tap before winter, removing some lights early spring, bringing back down the cushions for the garden benches.

Can my notes, can sections of my notes have seasons? There is always an ebb and flow in attention to certain topics and matters, which translate in the use, editing and creation of notes. That is maybe of a different frequency, a week or a few, a month, not a quarter year like a season. The thought of having a folder with notes named ‘the Winter archive’ crossed my mind, just because it sounded interesting, not because I have any notion about what it might actually contain.

Just a whimsical spring thought, riffing off a book title while my mind was simmering with notions about personal knowledge management.

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I have been using Hypothes.is, an annotation platform, for a bit over 3 years now (my account is 4 years old).
Storing bookmarks and creating annotations that way is easy. A browser add-on makes it one click (and the writing of course) to add an annotation.

Using the Hypothes.is Obsidian plugin also means any annotation comes into my notes seamlessly through the Hypothes.is API.

I use the same API to be able to post to Hypothes.is from within my personal feedreader’s reading flow (I can also post directly to my Obsidian notes there). This means I can annotate something without opening it separately in the browser at all.

Over time I’ve looked in wonder at the speed and volume with which Chris Aldrich uses Hypothes.is on a daily basis. To me it indicates that it is his main connection between his browsing and his rough notes. He hit 10k annotations three years ago already.

Although I have mostly reduced friction for making annotations themselves, my mental model of annotations and my practice haven’t much shifted since I started using Hypoythes.is in earnest in August 2022. (Around the time Chris mentioned above hit 10k annotations.)
One pitfall is similar to ‘I should write proper blog posts‘, ‘I should properly annotate‘. Meaning not having more than 1 annotation for a site or posting isn’t ‘proper’. Only annotating things I’m reading with focus count! That sort of thing. It means a much stricter curation than necessary. The only actual question is if I want to be able to find something back again. If so, then I should add it. It’s not only annotation, it’s bookmarking too.

That goes hand in hand with me more deliberately setting aside time for myself to explore things online. Something that I lost sight of a good while ago. Finding my way back to a sense of wonder, also means wandering about online, starting from a question or notion, and following the breadcrumbs others have left on the open web. This is the good old web-surfing habit of old.

The past week I deliberately spent more time browsing and bookmarking/annotating. My annotations jumped by over 100. As a result I added several interesting scientific papers to my Zotero library, added a few books to my library, and generally had a good time finding things I didn’t know I was looking for.

Hopefully this evolves in a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotation.

Two things I intend to do, to reduce friction for this even more.
One, currently from within my feedreader I can post to either my blog or to Hypothes.is, but not both. I want to change that, so that the same thing can serve two purposes simultaneously. (Or better yet, not for now, what if I could have my own instance of hypothes.is that is also visible as a category / stream in my website?)
Two, I haven’t figured out yet if I can get hypothes.is to work on mobile, for the initial bookmarking of a site. My mobile browser regularly has a lot of open tabs at the end of a day, some of it useful to retain.

Today I hit 1700 bookmarks and annotations. Let’s see where that number stands in 3 months, as a measure of a renewed bookmarking and annotation habit.