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Zygar  ·  3874 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: As We May Yet Think

Thank you for the welcome and the kind words!

We have a number of options available to us today--services like Evernote or Diigo have wide userbases and many evangelists. However, all of these tools are rooted in the same organisational conventions that we have been using since Gutenberg.

Ted Nelson:

    EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.

    Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't.

We are, as individuals, stuck with filing cabinets, predicated on lists and folders and tags. Worse, we're pulling things OUT of their original context, a deeply intertwingled web, to drop them into these filing cabinets. And while lists are fantastic as a tool for curatorship (these Hubski archives you talk about are the quintessential anthology), often the true value or "location" of an idea only reveals itself over time. Every single "external brain" service I've used ends with an inbox 3,000 items deep.

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I have actually been working on the solution to this, in various forms, for about two years--with things starting to get serious over the last 6 months. We just recently launched the beta of a platform we're calling Twingl, which is kind of like a "Dropbox for Knowledge." Instead of organising stuff using tags and folders, you simply make synapses (Twinglings) between items. And instead of one monolithic app-to-rule-them-all, we are building the brain itself; with all of your ideas and connections available in a variety of specialised apps.

The brain is still in utero at the moment (about 30 users so far); and is looking like this at Day 7 (with red dots being people, turquoise being comments, triangles being websites and yellow being highlighted bits of text.)