| Actually my main takeaway is that organizing information shouldn't occur in a single app. It needs to take advantage of the web as much as possible. The model I want is basically small "apps" joined by hyperlinks -- exactly what the web is. The primary app is a wiki with unstructured text, outlined/indented text and hyperlinks. But, as mentioned, information comes other forms too: structured data like bookmarks, spreadsheets, images, etc. The web lets you express all those things (spreadsheets being the weak link, since it involves executing code). Reinventing it all within a single app would be a lifetime of work. The web already has common patterns and facilities for log analysis and so forth. If you just make it a web site, you can track all your actions with web log analysis. Whereas if you make it some "app", then you have to reinvent the analytics. I definitely considered doing more textual analysis, stuff like PageRank, and even semantic analysis. I think it's interesting to explore but I don't the cost/benefit works out right now. I have over 2000 pages, but probably 500 or less are "active". That can mostly be managed with full text search, and nothing smarter. You just have to make the search fast, which isn't hard with that amount of data. But, if you want to write more code and programs against the data, a web site is a good format for doing so. I basically use the Unix philosophy of independent programs and data, rather than the "app" philosophy of data locked up behind code / user interface. My philosophy is just to optimize for speed and ease of both writing and reading. And then you use it more. And the more you use it, the more valuable becomes. Just like with learning itself, you start to make more connections once you have some existing knowledge/content to graft on to it. I think the most important thing is the content, and not the tool, and as long as the tool is lightweight and fast, you will keep up the habit of entering content and (just as importantly) retrieving it. |