| most people ignore that in our history, in various moments, many have crafted "universal systems" to organize information, few historical examples: - ~612 BC Ashurbanipal di Nineveh tablets, sort of structured tag-based library with more than 30k tags found, mostly used to note transactions and other daily life activities - ~245 BC Callimacus pínakes, another sort of tag-based index for the Alexandria giant library - ~1545 Conrad Gessner libraries of Babel, personal notes closely similar to "modern" ZettelKasten - 1673-94 Leibniz's Scrinium Literatum another far similar to Gessner's one and ZK - 1934 Paul Otlet & Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum, so-called the modern web ancestor - 1960 Niklas Luhmann's ZettelKasten Those are just few I remember but there are many others and surely many more not lost in the history. All claim to be universal and all have an ultimate goal: store&retrieve information as easily as possible to produce new one, to evolve. All are closely similar in principles (usage of meta-information, cataloguing techniques of various kind, keep individual "entries" small for easy isolation and composing etc). The web (1.0 so called) is the first general and global example of those systems. All fails though at a certain point. Long story short: there is no universal method to be followed slavishly expecting magic results, there are common needs, normally solved in closely similar ways with the tools of the time for millennia, the best option is understand the problem and the principle behind all those solutions tailoring one on our needs. Personally I use Emacs/org-mode/org-roam and various other related package to manage my personal information, suffering a bit by the lack of a more flexible storage than files and filesystems, but still enough to manage almost anything so effectively that I can't use modern desktops/sw anymore, it's not PARA, ZK etc but just another systems, without strict rules, tailored on my needs following the similar principles of all others. Popular modern one are LYT https://youtu.be/RgwnpEBFNUg or Jonny Decimal. |