Mid-November Update by [[Dan Allosso]]

https://obsidian.md/clipper

https://omnivore.app

https://tana.inc/docs/supertags

Meet Capacities, the do-it-all productivity app taking on Notion by [[JR Raphael]]

Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter by [[Casey Newton]]

Newton takes a thin view of the eternal question of information overload and whether or not AI might improve the situation. No serious results...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kazukinakayashiki/

While Kaiser recommends against the need to re-arrange physical cards from one drawer to another, which creates the need to refamiliarize oneself with their new locations, the same idea applies to switching from one digital note taking application to another as a similar switch of user interface functionality may cause additional overhead and stress thereby preventing quick use of the system itself.

Hookmark https://hookproductivity.com/

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-z5XcnT7cQ-zettel-critique-assistant

Zettel Critique Assistant<br /> By Florian Lengyel<br /> Critique Zettels following three rules: Zettels should have a single focus, WikiLinks indicate a shift in focus, Zettels should be written for your future self. The GPT will suggest how to split multi-focused notes into separate notes. Create structure note from a list of note titles and abstracts.

ᔥ[[ZettelDistraction]] in Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. February 20, 2024

https://capacities.io/

https://ideaflow.app/

Audio transcription notes with AI

2023-12-12 Released on PruductHunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideaflow

https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote

Given the recent state of Evernote and their beginning to charge larger amounts and close off their free tiers, I've moved copies of my data over to Obsidian just in case.

https://hedgedoc.org/

Reclaim Hosting / Reclaim Cloud has a one button installer for HedgeDoc

Friends of the Link uses this for collaborative note taking into the anagora.org.

https://etherpad.org/

A collaborative online editor

I Wish Bear Hadn’t Wasted Years<br /> by Yury Molodtsov

Some generic state-of-the-app in the note taking space.

Protolyst (collaborative note taking tool) is a product that Dr. Maddy is developing and showcasing in her YouTube Channel playlists.

Protolyst <br /> https://protolyst.org/

• Freemium model
• Focus on group collaboration over individual use

You can export Pages in your workspace as PDFs with more export formats to be added in the future (I did see one other snippet that indicated .csv format export, but it doesn't appear to have .md support to dovetail with all the other tools which use this as a baseline)

Found ᔥDr. Maddy in the description from Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners

An interesting looking Obsidian/Zotero plugin

ᔥTon Zijlstra (@ton@m.tzyl.eu) on Nov 01, 2023, 04:15

@richardcarter @geffrey I 2nd Richard here, prefer to keep them separate. I currently use https://zotlit.aidenlx.top/ as a plugin in both Zotero and Obsidian to handle the copying of annotations into Obsidian, rather than copy/pasting by hand. Outside of Zotero I also use hypothes.is for annotations that I grab into Obsidian through the h. API.

https://github.com/aks579/quilly

found via: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17dyv75/i_made_a_simple_open_source_personal_knowledge/

https://zeti.space/

A zettelkasten tool with potential AI functionality for linking. Cloud and local storage available.

heard about via: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/173ryxu/we_built_a_novel_tool_just_for_zetelkasten_with/

Anne Frank (June 12, 1929-1945)<br /> Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927-1998)

Niklas Luhmann was a year and a half older than Anne Frank who received her first card index file in February 1943 (likely between the 27th, the date of her diary entry mentioning it and the prior diary entry on February 5th), from her father at the age of 13. She was intended to use it as a "reading file" to note down the books she'd read along with the author and the date.

One can only wonder at how many entries she would have made over the span of her life had it not come to such an abrupt end.

https://aboard.com/

A card-based collaboration tool that leverages information visualization. Pinterest for collaborative teams with expandable data.

Looks interesting and I've got a beta invite, but not sure if it fits any of my needs, particularly with an eye toward note taking.

https://milanote.com/

Many writers and excerpters had amanuenses as helpers to copy out passages or to copy material over for them. Theodor Fontane would mark passages in books for his children to excerpt and copy over for him.

Compare this manual labor to that of more modern tools like Hypothes.is which allow one to digitally highlight and then excerpt almost automatically.

https://www.napkin.ai/

(Separate from https://www.napkin.one/)

A .csv downloadable list of note tools and related productivity applications

Airtable link: https://airtable.com/appip8TXg2OuHTati/shr1KApA0zHtZRdzd/tbl7OoiJ2jtMCpM5Q?backgroundColor=yellow&layout=card&viewControls=on

https://getupnote.com/

Suggested by Cato Minor<br /> Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android

https://mem.ai/

I've had this on a list for ages, but never put into my digital notes...

https://www.ploter.io/

https://xtiles.app/en

https://www.marginnote.com/

https://thoughtful.sandbox.google.com/about

https://www.napkin.one/

Yet another collection app that belies the work of taking, making, and connecting notes.

Looks pretty and makes a promise, but how does it actually deliver? How much work and curation is involved? What are the outputs at the other end?

https://amanote.com/

ᔥ u/gxabbo in r/Zettelkasten - Video Series: Denote as a Zettelkasten (accessed:: 2023-02-26 02:52:52)

https://discord.com/channels/717965437182410783/737323300967022732/1072563304289030164

https://zettels.info/en/int/default.asp

A digital note taking product

ᔥ[[Frank Berzbach]] in Künstliche Intelligenz aus Holz - sciencegarden - Magazin für junge Forschung at 2002-06-30<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-10 06:59:08)<br /> where he referred to it as "A free online Zettelkasten by Joachim Richter"

http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/<br /> Markus Krajewski's digital zettelkasten product.

ᔥ[[Frank Berzbach]] in Künstliche Intelligenz aus Holz - sciencegarden - Magazin für junge Forschung at 2001-06-30 (accessed:: 2023-02-10 06:53:55)

https://yellowchicken.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/personal-knowledge-base-features/

Interesting blogpost from 2018-07-21 as the rise in PKM and Zettelkasten was just about to take off. Provides a list of some of what was available in and around the space at the time.

https://www.pearltrees.com/

bookmark tool in the vein of pinboard, pinterest, etc.

https://wildrye.com/roundup-of-67-tools-for-thought-to-build-your-second-brain/

List of tools for thought apps

https://omnivore.app/<br /> Open source version of readwise

Originally bookmarked from phone on Sun 2023-01-15 11:25 PM

updated: 2023-01-17 with tag: "accounts"

reply to u/Subject_Industry1633 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zwgeas/is_the_zk_method_worth_it_and_how_it_helped_you/ (and further down)

ZK is an excellent tool for literature reviews! It is a relative neologism (with a slightly shifted meaning in English over the past decade with respect to its prior historical use in German) for a specific form of note taking or commonplacing that has generally existed in academia for centuries. Excellent descriptions of it can be found littered around, though not under a specific easily searchable key word or phrase, though perhaps phrases like "historical method" or "wissenschaftlichen arbeitens" may come closest.

Some of the more interesting examples of it being spelled out in academe include:

• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
• Webb, Sidney. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.
• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
• Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Particularly ch 7 if I recall correctly)

For academic use, anecdotally I've seen very strong recent use of the general methods most compellingly demonstrated in Obsidian (they've also got a Discord server with an academic-focused channel) though many have profitably used DevonThink and Tinderbox (which has a strong, well-established community of academics around it) as much more established products with dovetails into a variety of other academic tools. Obviously there are several dozens of newer tools for doing this since about 2018, though for a lifetime's work, one might worry about their longevity as products.

https://web.getmicropad.com/#

https://github.com/shaunabanana/intrigue

https://app.tana.inc/

Athens Research is winding down their note taking application.

Potentially the first of more to come?

Athens the OSS project is winding down. The company is still operating, but taking time to reset and explore new ideas. Open to chats and convos. Thanks all ❤️ https://t.co/Y7ROM86WSy

— Jeff Tang 🏛 (Ohio) (@tangjeff0) November 11, 2022

Someone looking for handwriting apps that allow one to use handwriting in digital contexts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ydwl32/handwriting_zettelkasten/

The first demo of TidlyWiki from 2004 took the ideas of wiki and applied them to fragments rather than entire pages. The hypothesis was that it would be easier to write in small interlinked chunks that could be gradually massaged into a linear narrativehttps://t.co/v2v6dyL3Oy pic.twitter.com/MJO7tyopr2

— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022

https://www.scrintal.com/

Registered 2022-09-07

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Will</span> in Review of “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (1952) by C. Wright Mills — Zettelkasten Forum (<time class='dt-published'>10/04/2022 10:44:44</time>)</cite></small>

Read 2022-10-10 00:35

One might suggest that the freedom, flexibility, and customization of these systems is actually an unuseful time suck for many users which only encourages shiny object syndrome. From a design perspective, try starting out building a system that works for you before beginning on design for others. Research and looking at the user interfaces offered by the competition will helpful as well. Which are the most popular? fun to use? Why? What actual affordances do those interfaces and functionalities allow? are they truly productive?

Possibly more productive, what sorts of standards can you leverage to make people's pre-existing notes more useful? Can you take pre-existing stores of .txt or .md files and provide different views or perspectives on them? This will allow people to pick and choose which applications might work with their stores of data to provide different views or perspectives on them. Why reinvent a text editor or tools like Logseq or Obsidian when you can leverage the local stores of data to provide the sorts of services you're not seeing in the broader space? For example, on the "social media" side, there are existing solutions for taking your locally stored notes, putting them into the cloud and displaying them on the web, but the various steps are highly technical and require a relatively large amount of work and admin tax to maintain. A service that allows one to point at their local store of data and automatically host it on a website and keep it synced would be a major boon for the non-technical user.

Separately, Matuschak did not invent evergreen notes. The first clear cut instantiation I've seen in the literature is from Konrad Gessner in 1548, and honestly even his idea really stems from a longstanding tradition of working with commonplace sententiae preceding his work. (see https://hypothes.is/a/uEboYlOwEeykkotYs594LA) Matuschak simply applied the definition/idea of "evergreen" (meaning easily reusable) articles or content from journalism to describe his notes which could be reused in various contexts. (Example: Why rewrite an article on how to decorate and entertain for the holidays, when you can reuse the same article you've been publishing for years, perhaps along with some updated photos?) "Atomic" notes is another variation on this same theme, but is one which underlies the ability to re-use notes in combination with one or more other notes to generate new ideas.

https://tana.inc/

Tinderbox really is a fantastic name for a note taking / personal knowledge management system. Just the idea makes me want to paint flames on the sides of my physical card index. https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

syndication link

I'd love to see a broader selection of more modern tools included here including Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, et al. Also missing are several writing specific apps which have been commonplace in academia for these purposes in the past including Tinderbox (Eastgate Systems, Watertown, MA) and DEVONthink (DEVONtechnologies, Coeur d’Alene, ID).

Google Suite includes several sub-applications that could appear here as stand alone options.

A good list can be found here: https://hyp.is/km4ZItbCEeyQtvfpTb-0Xg/www.buildingasecondbrain.com/resources

Who is using these forms in practice? I'd love to see some examples.

This sort of set up could be used with some outlining functionality to streamline the content creation end of common note taking practices.

Is anyone using a spreadsheet program (Excel, Google Sheets) as the basis for their zettelkasten?

Link to examples of zettelkasten as database (Webb, Seignobos suggestions)

syndication link

https://gitjournal.io/

A longer list I've been sporadically maintaining: - https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book#Platforms

Tiago Forte has a curated/downloadable list here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/resources

https://nota.md/

Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

The broad audiences for this book.

This may have been better place in the introduction to draw these people in.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/401/hopeful-theorist

This is a fascinating first hand example of note taking experience spanning several decades. It includes descriptions of personal experience with a wide variety of most of the major note taking digital applications during this time period and provides a clear preference for a text-only (digital) format.

It describes a collection of over 10,000 text notes and 6,000 bibliographic entries.

What are the common pitfalls when choosing a note taking application or platform?

Own your data

Prefer note taking systems that don't rely on a company's long term existence. While Evernote or OneNote have been around for a while, there's nothing to say they'll be around forever or even your entire lifetime. That shiny new startup note taking company may not gain traction in the market and exist in two years. If your notes are trapped inside a company's infrastructure and aren't exportable to another location, you're simply dead in the water. Make sure you have a method to be able to export and own the raw data of your notes.

Test driving many

and not choosing or sticking with one (or even a few)<br /> Don't get stunned into inaction by the number of choices.

Shiny object syndrome

is the situation where people focus all attention on something that is new, current or trendy, yet drop this as soon as something new takes its place.<br /> There will always be new and perhaps interesting note taking applications. Some may look fun and you'll be tempted to try them out and fragment your notes. Don't waste your time unless the benefits are manifestly clear and the pathway to exporting your notes is simple and easy. Otherwise you'll spend all your time importing/exporting and managing your notes and not taking and using them. Paper and pencil has been around for centuries and they work, so at a minimum do this. True innovation in this space is exceedingly rare, and even small affordances like the ability to have [[wikilinks]] and/or bi-directional links may save a few seconds here and there, in the long run these can still be done manually and having a system far exceeds the value of having the best system.

(Relate this to the same effect in the blogosphere of people switching CMSes and software and never actually writing content on their website. The purpose of the tool is using it and not collecting all the tools as a distraction for not using them. Remember which problem you're attempting to solve.)

Future needs and whataboutisms

Surely there will be future innovations in the note taking space or you may find some niche need that your current system doesn't solve. Given the maturity of the space even in a pen and paper world, this will be rare. Don't worry inordinately about the future, imitate what has worked for large numbers of people in the past and move forward from there.

Others? Probably...

https://lifehacker.com/which-epaper-tablet-is-best-for-digital-notes-1848859314

https://highlighted.app/

Highlighted.app Tagline: "Capture, organize and revisit important parts of your books."

Apple iOS only