Perhaps better: Provide fodder for thinking and creating?

7 Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 421.

relate this to Eminem's "stacking ammo".

The actual incubation here is highly dependent on re-visiting our notes for active use and reloading their contexts back into our minds as well as re-arranging them mentally or otherwise. The incubation doesn't happen within the system though the system can help save them for us. We still need to be able to search and interlink them.

Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?

We're 13% into the book already and still being sold on the why we need this... Can we move it along please? Perhaps some will need the "why" story, but in a book about productivity...

Forte's definition of a note.

Most people weren't taught positive or even useful note taking skills in school, and this is a massive problem in a knowledge-based and knowledge privileged society.

Definite bias for literacy here.

Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.

Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.

Tiago Forte directly equates a "digital commonplace book" with his concept of a "Second Brain" in his book Building a Second Brain.

Why create a new "marketing term" for something that should literally be commonplace!

6 Craig Mod, “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing,” craigmod.com, June 2011, https://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/.

It's not just me... I might hope that someone could leverage Hypothes.is' product to create a more explicit digital commonplace book out of their product.

Commonplace books were popularized in the late 1400s/early 1500s in handbooks by Desiderius Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, Rudolphus Agricola, and others along with the rise and accessibility of printed books.

Would have been nice to have some more background and history on their development and evolution. Mentions of florilegia, vade mecum, others perhaps? Other cultures?

I'm not a fan of digs at the idea of our "Paleolithic memory", particularly as there is some reasonable evidence that oral memory methods in the Paleolithic are probably vastly superior to those "modern" humans are using now.

Cross reference: Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.

imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.

Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

He uses the phrase "thoughts as treasures", but I'm reasonably sure that he doesn't do so with the same intention as the centuries of rhetoricians which preceded him.

Notice the creation myth being born here? Does he really believe that no one has noticed this before?

What about all the handbook writers who encouraged commonplacing in the 1500s, much less their predecessors?

Anecdotal evidence that not centralizing one's work is a road to failure.

Centralized note taking for easy search is key!

I had this same sense early on, but it involved a capacious memory rather than a reliance on written notes that I needed to consult.

He does build a sense of excitement and magic around the idea of taking notes here, though sadly he's covering up the amount of work that maintaining such a system entails.

David Allen has apparently not acquainted himself with any of the arts of memory.

experimented with every tool, trick, and technique available today for making sense of information. This book distills the very best insights I’ve discovered from teaching thousands of people around the world how to realize the potential of their ideas.

All this work just for this? When some basic reading of historical note taking, information management, and intellectual history would have saved him the time and effort? Looking through the references I'm not seeing much before even 2010, so it seems as if he's spent most of his time reinventing the wheel.

The ideas behind knowledge management are largely timeless, but they are far from unchanging. They have evolved slowly over 2000+ years until we broadly threw many of them away in the early 20th century.

One only need read a few pages of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age to see some of the changes and shifts within the space from the 1400s on.

Zettelkasten existed prior to Niklas Luhmann, who neither invented them nor coined their name.

The earliest concept of a digital garden stems from Mark Bernstein's essay Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas in 1998.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff's first mention of "digital garden" was on April 21, 2020

Progress on my digital garden / evergreen notebook inspired by @andy_matuschak🌱<br><br>Super grateful for @alyssaxuu who's been literally handholding me through the whole thing — thank you! pic.twitter.com/ErzvEsdAUj

— Anne-Laure Le Cunff (@anthilemoon) April 22, 2020

Which occurred after Maggie Appleton's mention on 2020-04-15 https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880

Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.<br><br>We have an epic collection going, check these out...<br><br>1. @tomcritchlow's Wikifolders: https://t.co/QnXw0vzbMG pic.twitter.com/9ri6g9hD93

— Maggie Appleton 🧭 (@Mappletons) April 15, 2020

And several days after Justin Tadlock on 2020-04-17 https://wptavern.com/on- digital-gardens-blogs-personal-spaces-and-the-future

Before this there was Joel Hooks by at least 2020-02-04 https://web.archive.org/web/20200204180025/https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden, though he had been thinking about it in late 2019: https://github.com/joelhooks/joelhooks-com/blob/36c21b34f02ade14d4e67915ff412462030282cd/content/blog/2019-12-08--on-writing-more~~qG38AKqxq/index.mdx

He was predated by Tom Critchlow on 2018-10-18 https://tomcritchlow.com/blogchains/digital-gardens/ who quotes Mike Caulfield's article from 2015-10-17 as an influence https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/amp/

Archive.org has versions going back into the early 2000's: https://web.archive.org/web/*/%22digital%20garden%22

I might argue that you're consuming in in the wrong way and thus not able to re-use it at the correct time.

Marketing speech to convert an old idea (commonplacing) into a new siloed service one needs to pay for.

While we may have the impression of instant access to the world's knowledge, this is really far from the truth. It's all there, but being able to search through it for what we want or being able to find or generate insight from it involves a massive mountain of hidden work that no one really wants to do in practice.

Some great marketing copy, but I'm anticipating a book that is going to lay out some general techniques that go under the topic of commonplace book, a concept that goes back over 2,000 years. This is the opposite of revolutionary.

Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Atria Books, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Building-a-Second-Brain/Tiago-Forte/9781982167387.

https://person-al.github.io/%F0%9F%8C%B3/2022/05/08/how-i-publish-my-zettelkasten.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>@person72443</span> in person: "Today on the blog...how I publish my #zettelkaste…" - Mastodon (<time class='dt-published'>05/17/2022 22:12:40</time>)</cite></small>

https://getrocketbook.com/pages/rocketbook-for-free

A wonderful resource of quotation related material online.

GWG, Some random thoughts:

Your challenge question is tough, not just for the mere discovery portion, but for the multiple other functions involved, particularly a "submit/reply" portion and a separate "I want to subscribe to something for future updates".

I can't think of any sites that do both of these functionalities at the same time. They're almost always a two step process, and quite often, after the submission part, few people ever revisit the original challenge to see further updates and follow along. The lack of an easy subscribe function is the downfall of the second part. A system that allowed one to do both a cross-site submit/subscribe simultaneously would be ideal UI, but that seems a harder problem, especially as subscribe isn't well implemented in IndieWeb spaces with a one click and done set up.

Silo based spaces where you're subscribed to the people who might also participate might drip feed you some responses, but I don't think that even micro.blog has something that you could use to follow the daily photo challenges by does it?

Other examples: https://daily.ds106.us/ is a good example of a sort of /planet that does regular challenges and has a back end that aggregates responses (usually from Twitter). I imagine that people are subscribed to the main feed of the daily challenges, but I don't imagine that many are subscribed to the comments feed (is there even one?)

Maxwell's Sith Lord Challenge is one of the few I've seen in the personal site space that has aggregated responses at https://www.maxwelljoslyn.com/sithlordchallenge. I don't think it has an easy way to subscribe to the responses though an h-feed of responses on the page might work in a reader? Maybe he's got some thoughts about how this worked out.

Ongoing challenges, like a 30 day photography challenge for example, are even harder because they're an ongoing one that either requires a central repository to collect, curate, and display them (indieweb.xyz, or a similar planet) or require something that can collect one or more of a variety of submitted feeds and then display them or allow a feed(s) of them. I've seen something like this before with http://connectedcourses.net/ in the education space using RSS, but it took some time to not only set it up but to get people's sites to work with it. (It was manual and it definitely hurt as I recall.)

I don't think of it as a challenge, but I often submit to the IndieWeb sub on indieweb.xyz and I'm also subscribed to its output as well. In this case it works as an example since this is one of its primary functions. It's not framed as a challenge, though it certainly could be. Here one could suggest that participants tag their posts with a particular hashtag for tracking, but in IndieWeb space they'd be "tagging" their posts with the planet's particular post URL and either manually or automatically pinging the Webmention endpoint.

Another option that could help implement some fun in the system is to salmention all the prior submissions on each submission as an update mechanism, but one would need to have a way to unsubscribe to this as it could be(come) a spam vector.

https://excalidraw.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q6DTouuLX0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyCPhbd51eo

https://thenib.com/piled-on/

https://finger.farm/

https://3stages.org/quotes/index.html

I thought I'd bookmarked this before, but apparently not in my notebook. Example of an explicit online commonplace book, primarily with quotes from J. Jacobs' reading.

Copies of The American Instructor:

• 1770, Philadelphia : Printed and sold by John Dunlap, at the newest printing-office, in Market-Street https://archive.org/details/americaninstruct00fish/page/n11/mode/2up
• 1770, New-York : Printed and sold by H. Gaine, at the Bible and Crown, in Hanover-Square, 14th Edition https://archive.org/details/2554018R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n9/mode/2up
• 1806, London : J. Johnson [etc.], 29th Edition https://archive.org/details/b28741109/page/n7/mode/2up

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ben-franklin-american-instructor-textbook-abortion-recipe.html

Evidence for Benjamin Franklin encouraging the education of women in mathematics.

Is there any familial relation between William Mather and Cotton Mather or his family?

If there is, this could be even more damning. A quick search indicates that William Mather was a schoolmaster and may have been a Quaker. This means that a highly religious schoolmaster was teaching and spreading ideas about abortion in 1699.

Virginia physician John Tennet's pamphlet The Poor Planter's Physician first appeared in 1734, and included details for effecting abortions. Benjamin Franklin found it to be so valuable that he copied it into his book The Instructor (1748).

Surely the pamphlet had appeared previous to 1734 as there's a copy labeled as the third edition which Benjamin Franklin had reprinted in 1734, which lists him as the publisher.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has written in a leaked draft opinion of Dobs v. Jackson Women's Health that "The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions."

However, historians have shown that in fact it was so deeply rooted in in early America that Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the country actively inserted medical advice about abortion into a widely read and popular primer on math and reading.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937996

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village.” The William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1991): 19–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2937996.

Related site with content based on this article: https://history.uconn.edu/taking-the-trade/#

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1521665224331436033.html

https://currentpub.com/2022/05/06/is-abortion-deeply-rooted-in-american-history/

A meta post with a brief synopsis and links to several other related articles and resources.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/uph7d4/songs_in_welsh/

https://person-al.github.io/

Owned by https://twitter.com/person72443, found via IndieWeb chat this month.

https://unherd.com/2022/05/george-monbiots-farming-fantasies/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Cherfas</span> in Eat This Podcast on Twitter: "Yup. Not bad at all." / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/17/2022 00:55:31</time>)</cite></small>

Bennett's Law: consumption of protein and fat rises with income.

much as poflible in the open Air. YOU muft feed upon a warm and cordial Diet, enrich’d with a great deal of Muflard, Nutmeg, Horfe-radijh and Garden, l Crejfes ;'at the lame Time avoiding every''"j thing that is aftringent, flegmatick, and 1 windy. And let your Drink be Beer, M brew’d with Sorrel-Leaves , or elfe Ground 1 Ivy-Tea . • 1 T O prevent this Complaint, young Women muft Ihake off Sloth, and make Ufe of their Legs, as well as their Hands* - They Ihou’d be cautious of taking Opiates j too often, or Jefuits-Bark , except in Cafes of great Neceffity; nor muft they long foie pretty Fellows, or any other Trajb whatfoe- ver.

https://archive.org/details/2574010R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n47/mode/2up?q=misfortune

Randomly came across this today. Who knew?

I love this older definition of a zany.

h/t:

Vintage alphabet with images of food, flora, fauna, household items, various sundry items, and a murder clown. pic.twitter.com/MqWYKcmjzt

— Michelle Krell Kydd (@glasspetalsmoke) May 25, 2021

https://twitter.com/glasspetalsmoke/status/1397196870913515520

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my7pofPrUKc

Give me an L!

Kind of funny, but it would have been better if he'd spelled it without the phone prompt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/ugqnle/whats_your_opinion_on_the_note_card_system_do_you/

For commonplace items, I've found notebooks with good indices more valuable. Note cards are better if you're taking atomic notes that you plan on actively reusing in your writing work which is more of a zettelkasten feature/functionality cards are easier to move around, re-arrange, and create outlines for your writing when you get to that point. Historically it was the ability to re-arrange and reuse one's commonplace items that helped to spawn and popularize the idea of zettelkasten, which are often more frequently used by writers, researchers, and academics for creating new content. Historically it was the ability to re-arrange and reuse one's commonplace items that helped to spawn and popularize the idea of zettelkasten, which are often more frequently used by writers, researchers, and academics for creating new content.

Some of the difference can be personal choice, practicality, ease-of-use, and the functionality you hope to get out of one method or the other. Honestly there's no reason you couldn't do both if you chose, but it may help to have a common index which will allow you to search for and find things you need. A set of useful historical examples can be found in the mid-twentieth century comedians including Bob Hope (pages he kept in files), Phyllis Diller (index cards), Joan Rivers (index cards), and actor/politician Ronald Reagan who maintained what some might call a commonplace book of quotes which he kept on index cards, but held in a notebook-like binder similar to a photo album with pages that he could place the cards in, but still allow him to move them around (both from slot to slot, or move whole pages at a time). The loosest system I've yet seen is that of Eminem who kept ideas and lyrics written on hotel stationery or random slips of paper which he kept wholly unorganized and unindexed in a cardboard box in a method he called "stacking ammo." Do what you think will work best for you and try it out for a while. You can always change methods later on if your needs change.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/uivpop/has_anyone_heard_the_new_adwaith_track_eto/

Sorry, just seeing this now. It's assuredly a sliderule, which would have been a common tool for engineers and mathematicians of his era to have had. They became less common with the advent and proliferation of calculators.

How did this work out? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips.

But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box.

Ie he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found.

A joker.

An example of a jokerzettel.

Link this to the Claude Shannon's useless machine (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) of a useless machine whose only function is to switch itself off. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

Niklas Luhmann kept a portion of his note taking system (ZK II Note 9/8j) specifically for joke related slips. It has been referred to as his jokerzettel.

This would seem to be in keeping with other examples kept in America by Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, and a wide variety of comics like Adam Sandler et al. who have moved to using notebooks.

This is the first time I've seen the word/phrase jokerzettel in print.

I do scan them, though in a somewhat different workflow than the batch processing that some might imagine. The broad outline and some of the specific details can be found here: Handwriting my Website with a Digital Amanuensis. The comments section of that post has some useful tips for folks on other platforms.

I tend to take a much narrower view of the use and function of a zettelkasten for the reuse of atomic ideas. As a result, from experience I'd recommend these sorts of details are probably better suited for future search in your blog, a personal wiki, or even a commonplace book format than for use in your zettelkasten. I've outlined some of the broad idea for this in an article: Zettelkasten Overreach. On the other hand, if an outline form of these things is imminently abstractable for future very active reuse in other programming environments, then perhaps it's worthwhile, but then you'd need to reach the appropriate level of abstraction for this reuse and you may have lost the more specific details for direct recreation needed as reminders for your future self.

Umberto Eco's book How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, 2015, #) can broadly be thought of as a zettelkasten system, but it advises a separate system for each project or writing assignment. This is generally good advice, and potentially excellent for students on a one-time basis, but it prevents one from benefitting from the work over multiple projects or even a lifetime.

In some sense, a more traditional approach, and one seen used in Niklas Luhmann's example is to keep different sections separated by broad topics.

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten #1 had 108 broad topics (along with a bibliography and a subject index), and zettelkasten #2 had 11 broad topics. (Cross reference: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht)

The zettelkasten structure allowed a familiar "folder" like top level structure, but the bibliographic and subject indices allowed them to interlink ideas from one space to the next for longer term work on multiple projects simultaneously.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/treeverse/

This is a stunning quote with respect to the idea of note taking and creating connections between pieces of information or knowledge.

It's highlighted to an even greater degree that this quote appears in someone's online digital commonplace book!

https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

The current discourse around personal knowledge management is out of hand, but not necessarily for all the reasons stated here. There are many issues and we have a lot of history and practice to recover. We also have lost sight of the "why are we doing this?" question before jumping into some of these practices with both feet.

This perspective is the same sort of hero worship that has too often been beaten into people (and especially students) over the centuries.

You have to be an absolute genius to be able to create work like that of Francis Bacon, Conrad Gessner, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Carl Linnaeus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Isaac Newton, Umberto Eco, Philip Melanchthon, Erasmus Darwin, Rudolphus Agricola, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Burns right?

Here's the secret: all of them kept extensive notebooks, commonplace books, or zettelkasten-like note collections. Small little pieces aggregated over time allowed them to create great things.

I suspect that if one looks at famous creators/writers throughout history they will discover that some sort of personal knowledge management system at the core of their practice.

This completely loses the fact that two different areas of work can be used fruitfully in combinatorically creative ways to expand insight and knowledge. While you can loosely forget what is in your notes, the fact that they exist and are interlinked helps you resurface and reuse them. If you're not reusing and constantly linking them, then you're failing.

I can be on board with this. Lovely quote.

Based on my preliminary reading of Tiago Forte's forthcoming book, this seems broadly true.

I have tongue-in-cheek posted a massive graph indicating that it was only a "few days work" to see what sort of reaction it would get. No one batted an eyelash, which makes me think that too many are "collectors" and aren't actually building something or using their system correctly.

There is a dearth of solid examples of these systems online for people to look at and evaluate critically. This is killing the space slowly.

I will agree that there are far too many "influencers" and "gurus" out there selling something in the note taking space. Almost none of them know what the hell they're talking about.

This useless knowledge graph is one of the worst parts about Roam Research. It is bad UI and wholly unusable.

In watching the space and seeing the sorts of conversations and questions I see online in Twitter, Reddit, and other fora, I too often see people talking about the system(s) and not actually using the systems. Very few get to a critical mass of well written notes, which I estimate to be about 500 to 1000 before they give up. Most aren't taking good notes and are imposing far more structure on them as if they're writing wiki articles instead of taking notes. Too many things go wrong in their processes before they're giving up and moving on. This has the effect of making the enterprise appear to be a failure.

I suspect that the author of this piece is in this last group and instead of thinking about why they're failing, they're lashing out about the hype in the space. Certainly there is way too much hype, and that isn't necessarily a good thing. But there's also not nearly enough practice and that is far worse.

There is a heavy availability heuristic at play here. Most people in the recent/modern PKM space are enamored with the idea of zettelkasten and no one (or very few) have delved in more deeply to the history to uncover more than Luhmann. There definitely are many, many more. If we expand the circle to include looser forms like the commonplace book then we find that nearly every major thinker since the Renaissance kept some sort of note taking system and it's highly likely that their work was heavily influenced by their notes, notebooks, and commonplace books.

Hell, Newton invented the calculus in his waste book, a form of pre-commonplace book from which he apparently never got his temporary notes out into a more personal permanent form.

A short trip to even the scant references on the Wikipedia pages for commonplace book and zettelkasten will reveal a fraction of the extant examples.

While the truly greatest authors may have "cut through the knowledge graph with a bold and forceful line", the vast majority of them are just re-tracing the same lines over again in crayon.

Rarely do articles or books contain more than one or two insights, new or otherwise.

This sounds clever, but it belies the amount of work that can go into such systems on the font end instead of on the back end. It also sounds as if the author hasn't used such a system to even a low level of critical mass to begin discovering any serendipity or finding any insight in their links.

Information overload goes back much further in history than the digital revolution. I might argue that information managers have tamed large portions of the beast already and we've forgotten many of the methods and as a result we're now either reinventing or rediscovering them as we transfer them to the digital space.

Villar-Onrubia, Daniel, and Victoria I. Marín. “Independently-Hosted Web Publishing.” Internet Policy Review 11, no. 2 (April 26, 2022). https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.2.1665.

https://policyreview.info/glossary/independently-hosted-web-publishing

Fun to see the IndieWeb wiki cited in academic literature.

This idea of independently hosted versus self-hosted comes up frequently in IndieWeb chat. The IndieWeb doesn't generally participate in the "purity test" of requiring full self-hosting as a result.

Might Hypothes.is also be included with this list? Though it could go a bit further toward packaging and making it more easily available to self-hosters.

Giving a student their own cyberinfrastructures, a set of digital tools, is not too dissimilar from encouraging them to bring tools like notebooks, paper, index cards, pens, and paper in the early 20th century or slate and chalk generations earlier.

Having the best tools for the job and showing them how to use them is paramount in education. Too often we take our tools for thought for granted in the education space. Students aren't actively taught to use their pens and paper, their voices, their memories, or their digital technologies in the ways that they had been in the past. In the past decade we've focused more on digital technologies, in part, because the teachers were learning to use them in tandem with their students, but this isn't the case with note taking methods like commonplacing, card indexes (or zettelkasten). Some of these methods have been taken for granted to such an extent that some of them are no longer commonplace within education.

I'll quickly note that they don't seem to have a reference to Campbell in their list. (oops!) Presumably they're referencing Gardner Campbell, though his concept here seems to date to 2009 and was mentioned heavily in the ds106 community.

ha!

https://indieweb.org/site-deaths names a large number of others

Is there a need for a word to describe this? Does indieweb have baggage to warrant using 'independently-hosted web publishing'?

I like the idea of affirmative disruption--it's got a positive connotation and takes back the idea of disruption which has been co-opted by "big social".

https://www.thedrive.com/cleaning-detailing/33205/how-to-clean-headlights

https://nation.cymru/culture/welsh-language-plaque-unveiled-at-dylan-thomas-birthplace/

Just in time for the International Dylan Thomas Day on May 14th!

https://sashinexists.com/vault/

Behind a paywall, but described by the maintainer as an online zettelkasten.

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>https://indieweb.social/@elgg/</span> in Platform for Social Apps: "Map of #Reddit https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-r…" - Indieweb.Social (<time class='dt-published'>05/13/2022 13:29:09</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/robot-laws/

Last.fm's robots.txt file includes the following Easter egg:

Disallow: /harming/humans<br /> Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders<br /> Disallow: /harm/to/self

https://thenewstack.io/why-developers-should-experiment-with-the-fediverse/

One of the main features of Darius Kazemi's Hometown, a fork of Mastodon from 2019, is that it allows "local only posting". This gives the users an option to post their content only with a small, limited group of people instead of spreading it widely outside of their social group. In addition to helping to tummel a smaller conversation this also prevents those who are more likely to suffer from context collapse of the groups social norms from engaging and potentially souring the conversation.

This feature could also be well leveraged for small private classroom conversations between teachers and students without leaking their personal/private data or conversations that ought to be small as they learn.

Could also be fun to limit the level of federation to the level of an academic department, academic discipline, or even a university. How might one define a group or groups of publics within Mastodon so that one could choose a level at which to share their content?

Just like chilling action by political actors, social media corporations can use changes in policy and APIs to stifle and chill speech online.

This doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors building bots to actively cause harm, but there is a class of potentially helpful and useful bots (tools) that can make a social space better or more interesting.

How does one regulate this sort of speech? Perhaps the answer is simply not to algorithmically amplify these bots and their speech over that of humans.

More and more I think that the answer is to make online social interactions more like in person interactions. Too much social media is giving an even bigger bullhorn to the crazy preacher on the corner of Main Street who was shouting at the crowds that simply ignored them. Social media has made it easier for us to shout them back down, and in doing so, we're only making them heard by more. We need a negative feedback mechanism to dampen these effects the same way they would have happened online.

There's some odd irony in this quote. Kazemi indicates that Twitter was unfriendly for bots, but he should be specific that it's unfriendly for non-corporately owned bots. One could argue that much of the interaction on Twitter is spurred by the primary bot on the service: the algorithmic feed (bot) that spurs people to like, retweet, and interact with more content and thus keeping them on the platform for longer.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1059788127/reading-list-bookmark-library-card?pop=1

A pretty little bookmark

A longer form of the idea:

The answer to any question about doing something is either HELL YES!, or no.

https://curtismchale.ca/2022/02/02/publish-obsidian-documents-to-wordpress/

Obsidian -> WordPress publishing. I'm in!

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>@phonetonote </span> in scott on Twitter: "tools for thought will continue to work better if we make them interoperable. to continue on this journey, please join the discussion on github — https://t.co/kpOF0gAgqO and a thank you to @davewiner for getting this project (and a few others :) ) off the ground" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2022 21:13:19</time>)</cite></small>

https://hypothes.is/users/hrheingold

Just a note to say that there are a handful of us who have "quietly" read and enjoyed this piece Matthew, see: https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

Thanks for your work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/unopml/finished_1st_draft_of_book_but_need_your_advice/

Someone considering re-creating Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain business, but with pen and paper.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/brandy-vanilla-butter

Based a sampling of recipes, the ratio (by weight) of butter to sugar can vary from 1:1 to 1:2 with brandy added tablespoons at a time to taste.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/easy-traditional-brandy-butter-recipe-435727

https://www.biospace.com/article/researchers-answer-how-and-why-infants-die-from-sids/

Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS

Example of an article that incorrectly credits Niklas Luhmann with creation of the Zettelkasten.

Another example of someone misattributing the invention of the zettelkasten to Niklas Luhmann. At least Soren Bjornstad modifies the attribution to say modern form, but I suspect that this is more of a verbal hedge more than being backed up with actual evidence, though perhaps the video will bear out more detail?

The availability heuristic is so strong in Luhmann's case, that he is attributed the invention. I find that few people can point to or ever mention any others who used the method.

Here Ahrens doesn't say that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten, but he comes pretty close and is heavily implying it rather than delving into the ways which Luhmann may have been taught this practice.

This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.

This is fun marketing, but Niklas Luhmann did not invent the idea of the zettelkasten

Evidence that Tiago should be aware that Le Cunff didn't coin "digital garden" in 2020.

https://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2011/12/18/relaxing-digital-garden-how-thrive-21st-century

An early reference to the idea of digital gardens with respect to not only the digital space but gardening within education.

Could this have potentially influenced Mike Caulfield's Garden and the Stream essay?

Oldest reference to digital garden on Twitter

notes that when you don't tend to your digital garden, people come along, think your work is weeds, and pull it from existence.

— Matthew Oliphant (@matto) February 19, 2007

Second earliest reference to digital garden on Twitter

tending to the digital garden.

— seansalmon.ugh 🤷‍♂️ (@seanaes) October 1, 2007

https://tommcfarlin.com/digital-gardens-and-blogs/

Relatively early mention of digital gardens in the blogosphere on 2020-04-15

First post on r/DigitalGardens was on June 29, 2020

https://jan.boddez.net/articles/syndicating-to-indienews

Historians need to be cautious not to take a whiggist and teleological view of historical events. They should be careful to place events into their appropriate context to be able to evaluate them accurately.

The West, in particular, has a tendency to discount cultural contexts and view human history as always bending toward improvement when this is not the case.

link to Dawn of Everything notes

"Scientist" is a neologism coined in 1834, by William Whewell and was originally meant tongue-in-cheek.

Who coined the word "scientist" in 1834? :: William Whewell

Science needs to be seen and understood in its appropriate historical context. Modern culture (and even scientists themselves) often forget the profound impact of theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic factors on how science develops and how we perceive it.

Principe, Lawrence M. (2013, July 8). History of Science: Antiquity to 1700 (Vol. 1200) [.mp3]. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-science-antiquity-to-1700

Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.

It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/slippy/

This WordPress plugin looks like it's a solid custom post type for creating a digital zettelkasten. Looks like it relies on tags/categories for linking, though has a custom link function. This in combination with Webmention could be a useful bi-directional link set up.

https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

IFTTT.com sent out a marketing email today in which one of the five major headlines was "Automated Notebook": "Your Ideas and Inspiration in one place" with a big "Explore" button that goes to https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YRjDAeAE0

https://www.edvo.com/

Beta app for note taking/productivity.

https://heptabase.com/

A visual note-taking tool for learning complex topics. (YC W22)

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/dN4iQHyFEeyOQtNdg7aedw and related notes.

Note the phrase "Card Index" in the title of this article in lieu of the more common German zettelkasten.

This is a fine sentiment, but a networked version of wikilinks is bound to cause conflicts in folksonomies and issues with sourcing and verifiability. The potential for context collapse is potentially too great to have these scale for this type of knowledge production. One would need to have trusted groups to create usefulness. Search at scale for these is likely to be at issue as well.

Are the affordances beyond the local scale really any better than current web technologies? What about the potential effects on the commons?

Create a list of tools that feature [[wikilink]] functionality.

• WikiMedia
• TiddlyWiki
• other wikis...
• Roam Research
• Obsidian
• other note taking apps...
• Trello
• Notion
• Airtable
• GitHub

https://www.athensresearch.org/

I've got Athens in my list of apps somewhere already...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/lacrosse/2022/05/10/delaware-state-lacrosse-team-charter-bus-stopped-searched-in-georgia/9713909002/

Most of the object-based metaphors for the mind over the past two centuries are spaces or location-based: a cabinet, a theater, a room, or a house. This would seem to show a close association of our prior uses of mnemotechniques, particularly the method of loci, for remembering anything with the mind.

Are there any non-object/non-location based metaphors other than the tabula rasa mentioned by Matthew Daniel Eddy?