I’m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing ‘chunks’ organised. I started playing around with a new piece of database software called Obsidian after recording an episode about it for the On The Reg podcast with my co-host Dr Jason Downs. Obsidian makes your notes more useful by ‘linking your thinking’. Basically, any word in an Obsidian note can become a link to another note, so, over time, your notes become like your own personal wikipedia. Obsidian also makes a cool visualisation of all the links between your notes, so you can surf through them, visually. Pages are represented as nodes; pages which have a lot of incoming links become bigger in the visual graph, literally showing you where an idea is ‘growing’:
I'm not sold on Obsidian. I think TiddlyWiki has equivalent (and more) features (albeit requiring plugins for graphing), a more robust architecture, and a more open license.
Horses for courses I guess, but depending on Obsidian's evolution, I suspect other writers might end up looking for alternatives.

