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.
After under 3 weeks I had some 140 notes in my conceptual 'garden' (mostly 'recycled' from my own earlier blogposts and presentations), and I report making the first novel connection for myself at 35 notes.
Especially going through presentations is a rich source of notes
For me, presentations represent a well-organised set of concepts that I'm familiar with, and that are relatively well-connected to other ideas.
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.
I've sometimes noticed this kind of connection in my own thinking, when revisiting an old post and realising that it's connected (sometimes very powerfully) with what's going on with me currently. I had just forgotten that I used to think about these ideas.
Only doing responsive writing based on daily RSS feed input feels too empty in comparison
This is why I stopped doing something similar i.e. writing short-form comments on posts that appeared in my RSS reader. I suppose it may have served a purpose in that I could have been surfacing potentially interesting information for others, along with a short comment on why I thought it was interesting. But it didn't leave me with much of a feeling of satisfaction.
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 hear this completely, as it's something that I've been thinking about as well. However, I went the other way, and decided that including factual information in my system seems reasonable. I thought that I'd end up spending too much time trying to decide what notes should go into which system. Where is boundary between a "fact" I came up with that's true in my context, and a fact that I read in a book? I was worried that this distinction would end up creating an arbitrary boundary between my own thoughts and the thoughts of others, when the only thing I really care about is whether the output of the system (i.e. my thinking) would be enhanced.