This is the frontpage of my emerging wiki-like collection of semi-permanent content. Where blogposts form a ‘river’ of items, for reference it is useful to have a range of more static ‘pools’ of content. Both to provide additional context and background to blogposts, as well as a useful documentation in itself. Documentation of ongoing work, reading, research, or experiments. (April 2018).
Last tended on 6 January, 2022 (first created 14 April, 2018)
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With my increased blogging in the past 6-7 months, I’ve been thinking again about the role this blog is serving and has served since 2002.
A long time ago, in the spring of 2004, when the likes of Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, I wrote about that richer representation as ‘a personal presence portal‘ and I came across that posting again in the past days.
In recent weeks I’ve added some functionality (a short posting stream, a wiki-section, and a tweet like micro-posting stream) which is an expression of both my more intensive usage of my own blog, as well as removing myself from social media silo’s such as Facebook. These additions were all rather spontaneous, but together constitute a wish to have this blog be a richer public representation of me and my activities, a richer online presence.
In that old posting from 2004 I mention several dimensions of presence, as formulated in a 1997 article by Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton from Temple University.
Presence as Social Richness
Presence as Realism
Presence as Transportation
Presence as Immersion
Presence as Social Actor within Medium
Presence as Medium as Social Actor
I find these six are still interesting angles to look at the role of this blog as a space, as an entry point, place of interaction, as repository and more.
‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’
I like the notion of cards, that @visakanv describes, and threading them into a bigger whole.
I too have a mountain’s worth of snippets, pieces, half sentences. And I have a much lower stack of postings and extended notes. Interesting stuff doesn’t get shared, because I envision a more extensive, a more ‘complete’ write-up that then more often than not never happens. The appeal to PKM above is key here for me. The world isn’t just cards, I agree with Neil, who pointed me to the posting above, fragmentation isn’t everything. Because synthesis and curation are important. However, having that synthesis in a fully different channel than the ‘cards’ from which it is built, or rather not having the cards in the same place, so that both don’t exist in the same web of meaning seems less logical. It’s also a source of hesitance, a threshold to posting.
Synthesis and curation presume smaller pieces, like cards. Everything starts out as miscellaneous, until patterns stand out, as small pieces get loosely joined.
I don’t know why Visakanv talks of threading only in the context of Twitter. Almost like he’s reinventing tags (tags are a key organising instrument for me). To me threading sounds a bit like a trail of breadcrumbs, to show from which elements something was created. Or cooking, where the cards are the list of ingredients, resulting in a dish, and dishes resulting in a dinner or a buffet.
More ‘cards’, snippets, I find a useful take on how to post in this space (both the blog part and the wiki part), and also bring more from other channels/tools in here.
(I took the photos during Breda Photo Festival, of Antony Cairns IBM CTY1 project, which is photos printed on IBM punch cards and held together with pins.)
You can subscribe to new content on this site by using a variety of available feeds. Feedreaders should be able to discover the main feed and responses feed on their own. But there are more feeds available than just those two. This is a WordPress site, so almost everything also has its own RSS feed.
Main Feeds
You can get all new content by following the main RSS feed (as listed in the right sidebar). The URL is just this blog’s URL with /feed at the end. This is true for all other types of feed, just add /feed at the end. This feed is also how I share my posts to Micro.blog/Ton
In the past some feed readers have been blocked by my hosting provider as malicious bots. If that happens to you, you can use the Feedburner feed as an alternative. (But be aware that Google will collect data from you using their Feedburner service.) It also contains all postings.
There is also a microformatted feed, h-feed, which provides JSON output. This however only has content that is shown on the front page of my blog, i.e. things I consider ‘main’ articles. The day to day observations and bookmarks etc. are not in that h-feed.
There are two main feeds for responses to content, one for any type of response (including likes, mentions etc.), and one for comments only.
Dutch language posts (feed), and German language posts (feed) both have their own feed. The default language is English and has no separate feed. All main feeds contain also the non-English postings.
Everything has a /feed
This is a WordPress site, so almost everything also has its own RSS feed. (WordPress.org page on feeds)
If you add /feed to the URL of a single posting, you will get the feed for comments on that specific content-item.
Every tag or category has its own feed. Go to the overview page and add /feed to the url. E.g. the posts with tag unconference at
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/tag/unconference/have their own feedhttps://www.zylstra.org/blog/tag/unconference/feed. Similarly a category overview likehttps://www.zylstra.org/blog/category/deutsch/, the category for German language posts hashttps://www.zylstra.org/blog/category/deutsch/feedas feed. There are different categories used by pages and by postings, so they have separate feeds. As the Digital Garden (wiki section) in this site is built from pages, this allows you to subscribe to the wiki, or individual wiki categories separately from my blog.Browse. Search. Subscribe. Image by Kris Krüg, license CC BY SA
In the past 2.5 weeks I have focused some time on building better notes. Better notes, as in second order notes: processed from raw notes taken during the day. Below are some experiences from that note taking.
My intention
This in order to build a better thinking aid, by having an easy accessible collection of my own ideas and concepts, and interesting viewpoints and perspectives of others (and references). It isn’t about collecting factual info.
I want to build a more deliberate practice this way, to enable a flow to create more and better output (writing, blogging, idea development etc.), in which more ideas are turned into something I apply or others can apply. In past years I have regularly stayed away from reading non-fiction books as I felt I had nowhere to go with the thoughts, associations and ideas reading something normally generates. No deliberate practice to digest my readings, resulting in it bouncing around my head and a constant nagging notion ‘I should be doing something with this’. Getting it out in atomic notes is a way of letting those associations and ideas build a network of meaning over time, and for me to see what patterns emerge from it.
In turn this should make it easier and faster for myself to create presentations, e-books, and blogposts etc. To have those writings start within me more. Only doing responsive writing based on daily RSS feed input feels too empty in comparison. And more importantly to not reinvent my own concepts from the top of my head everytime I e.g. put together a presentation (making it very slow going).
Curent state
I’m now at 140 notes. Which is about double the number I expected to be at, as I estimated earlier some 4 notes per day should be possible. Notes get linked to eachother where I feel there’s a connection. The resulting cloud is shown below.
(The singular points around the outer edge are not part of the thinking tool, they’re ticklerfiles from my GTD notes. Similarly there is a series of daily logs that aren’t part of the thinking tool either, but may point to notes in it. I don’t count or discuss those notes here.)
Two tactics helped me generate notes more quickly to incorporate more of my own previous thinking/writing.
Daily I check my old blog postings made on today’s date in previous years. This presents me with a range of postings during the week (not every day), for me to process. Sometimes it will be easy and short to capture key notions/ideas from them, other times it might be a trip down the rabbithole.
I go through presentations I made earlier, and lift out the concepts and ideas from the slides. I’ve done four sofar, one on Networked Agency, MakerHouseholds, on FabLabs, and on Community building / stewardship.
Doing just those two things resulted in the cloud of linked notes above. Especially going through presentations is a rich source of notes. I tend to build new stories every time for a presentation, so they often represent my current perspective on a topic in ways that aren’t documented elsewhere. With these notes I am turning them into re-usable building blocks.
What’s additionally valuable is that making the notes also leads to new connections that I hadn’t thought of before, or didn’t make explicit to myself yet. The first time happened early on, at about 35 notes, which was a linking of concepts I hadn’t linked earlier in my mind. In subsequent notes processing my SHiFT 2010 keynote ‘Maker Households’, that connection was fleshed out some more.
Another type of linkage isn’t so much previously unlinked concepts, but linking across time. A blogpost from a year ago and one from last month turned out to be dealing with the same notions, and I remember them both, but hadn’t yet perceived them as a sequence or as the later post being a possible answer to the earlier post.
Garden of Forking Paths
I call my collection of notes my Garden of Forking Paths. It refers to the gardening metaphor of personal knowledge management tools like wikis, commonplace books etc., often named digital garden, like my public wikisection here.
The fantastic title “Garden of Forking Paths” comes from a 1941 short story by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges titled El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan. It foreshadows the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and has also been referred within hypertext fiction and new media. In 1987 it was worked into Victory Garden, an early hypertext novel, published by Eastgate. Eastgate is Mark Bernstein’s company, an early blogger I first met 16yrs ago, that also creates the Tinderbox software, an amazing tool I use almost daily. Such a rich layering of connections and meaning, both contentwise and personally, are precisely what my notes collection is about, which makes ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ the most fitting title I could hope to find.
The set-up now
My current set-up for taking notes currently is based on using the tool Obsidian. This is a closed source app, but my notes are stored as regular text files, so can be accessed, edited etc through the file system itself. Obsidian provides bidirectional linking, and builds a connection graph on the fly (as shown above). I mentioned Tinderbox, which is also very useful for storing notes. In this case I’m not using it. Though notes in Tinderbox would be available as XML through the file system too, they aren’t easily human readable as the mark down notes I am creating now are, and thus access through the file system is of limited use. While Tinderbox is very useful at visually presenting information, that visual presentation is created by myself. What I am looking for is the emerging patterns from such visualisation, which Tinderbox can’t provide.
Obsidian not being open source is only slightly problematic to me at the moment, as it provides a view on a collection of text files, and nothing is lost except the visualisation if the application falls away. However, an open source alternative exists, which is Foam. However that in turn builds on the only pseudo-open application VS Code by Microsoft, unless I would compile VS Code myself. I may well go that way, but currently I’m experimenting and I’m not sure I want to spend that effort right now. The text files can be used in Foam, so that’s not a barrier. I did install Foam and VS Code, and will try it out in the coming days, although I haven’t fully figured out how to work with it.
Next to Obsidian I use Zotero to keep references to books, documents and snapshots of webpages. This removes these types of material from Evernote, which I count as a positive, without diluting the notes collection as something that are just my views and other things in my own words. In notes I point to references in Zotero where appropiate. It allows notes to be properly referenced, which is valuable when using them to write material based on them.
The note taking process
The process for note taking has several inputs, which currently aren’t all in use:
old blogposts, which I look at daily
old presentations, which I’ve been doing
notes resulting from feed reading, which I am doing
notes from primary notes (made during conversations etc.), which I’m not yet doing
notes from reading books / texts, which I haven’t done yet.
The first two inputs are my key way of building up notes capturing my existing notions, ideas, concepts etc. This is a way to create a repository of existing thought, and that’s the phase I am now in. Especially presentations are a rich source, but can take a lot of effort to process.
Notes as output from feed reading is currently limited but I expect this to grow over time. The same is true for notes from primary notes and from reading books, both I expect to pick up pace over time, once the first wave of ‘braindumping’ is over.
There is another part of my book reading-to-notes process that is already in place, however. That is the part which pertains to Zotero. I am reading non-fiction books on a Nova2 e-ink tablet. Both highlights as well as notes I make during reading, can be easily exported from it, and I add those to Zotero alongside the metadata of the book itself. The same can be done for notes made on a Kindle (find your Kindle notes at read.amazon.com/kp/notebook while you’re logged into Amazon). This keeps those annotations as raw material available in Zotero, and allows me to more easily process them into proper notes, capturing a concept or perspective. I have read a few books this way, but haven’t gotten around to processing my annotations from one yet. It’s next on my experimentation list.
My intention, reprise
At the start of this posting I wrote note taking in this way should make it easier and faster for myself to create blogposts and other written output. This post was written re-using notes, which sped up the creation time considerably, so that part of the experiment seems to be working. A true test will come when creating a new presentation I think, outlining a narrative using existing singular notes. The current set-up supports that much in the same way Tinderbox supports it: it’s easy to create a note that contains references to other notes and/or embeds them, turning them into a readable whole, even as you’re still shifting singular points around.
Today at 14:07 it is exactly 19 years ago I published the first post on this blog. Back then I already mention how connecting to others, conversation, is the key thing I’m aiming for. I’ve always been a prolific note maker (going back to primary school even, buying my own notepads). With the launch of my weblog it became a more public thing as well as a means to engage with others.
In recent years I’ve marked the occasion by reflecting on my blogging and practices (see the 18, 17, 16 years edition), and long ago I marked the 3rd and 5th anniversary both extolling the value of the conversations and connections this blog helped create.
This year, as most of last year was spent working from home. It meant a similar internal oriented focus when it comes to my note making and blogging.
I haven’t spend time on IndieWeb community organising for instance, didn’t feel the energy for it either. I did make steps towards making this blog much less dependent on third parties:
I stopped embedding Flickr images in my blog, replacing them with locally hosted copies while linking to the original. Most postings now no longer have Flickr embeds, some 150 still do, which I am slowly bringing down to 0.
I removed all video embeds, replacing them with stills and links
I slowly replaced a number of Slideshare decks, but not all yet. There are no actual slideshare embeds active anymore on my blog, as I deleted my account, but the now non-functional embeds still ‘call’ those web adresses. I’m self-hosting my slides on tonz.nl (Dutch), and tonz.eu (English)
I experimented with sharable bookshelves for my blog, but there’s a connection missing with my internal note taking. I’d very much like to directly generate my book lists and book posts directly from my own notes. I haven’t actually posted about books here since January, a fact I dislike.
That brings me to the note making part. I have completely removed myself from Evernote, replacing it with a local collection of notes in markdown. I’ve kept them separate of the notes collection I actually work with, but import specific notes when I need them. I also, based on an example from fellow Obsidian user Wouter Groeneveld, started scanning my paper notebooks from over the years, creating indexes for them, and thus making them connect to my ongoing work and notes. My use of Obsidian to maintain those markdown notes continues undiminished. The speed of creating new conceptual nodes has slowed a lot, having mined most of my old blogposts for their content. I am now slowly evolving my ways of digesting and adding new knowledge and thoughts. In terms of volume, there are now some 5k notes, of which 1k6 are conceptual, 1k are ‘collected stuff’ with just a few added remarks of why I find them interesting, and some 2k5 work related notes.
In general I would like to see a more direct connection between my notes and my blogging, and ‘wiki’ pages on this site. I’m not sure yet what I’d like so I need to experiment. In the past months I have been contributing to two GitHub hosted sites using Respec, where the site is directly created from my notes. This works really well, but as those are public pages I do keep the corresponding notes in a different place than my ‘real’ notes. I do want to maintain the difference between public and private, as it influences my writing, but I do not necessarily want to keep the public notes in a separate location from the others.
Coincidentally, around note making, I did do some outreach and hosted two ‘Dutch language Obsidian user meet-ups‘. The third is due to take place in two weeks.
For the coming time this note-to-blog pipeline, and making it easier for myself to post, will be my area of attention I think. Let’s see next year around this time, when I hit the two decade mark with this blog, how that went.
How I took notes in 2006, on a locally hosted wiki
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