
The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases - zzzmarcus
http://marcusvorwaller.com/blog/2015/12/14/personal-knowledgebases/
======
biztos
I think vendor lock-in is at least as big a problem as searching and scaling.
Arguably bigger for this audience: if I have easy unfettered access to the
data itself I can always try something else for search/scale.

I've tried a few and at least twice tried to write my own (and gave up due to
scope creep). Right now I just have a bunch of Markdown files and a giant
messy DropBox folder and an almost-as-messy set of private GitHub repos. And
photos. And videos. And e-mail. And backups. (What does one do with a Zip disk
these days?)

I bet a lot of people my age (mid-40's) or older have the same problem:
choosing or building a system we think would work long-term, and then
gathering and organizing all the "legacy" stuff (which you definitely want!)
is already an enormous undertaking, and so instead we live with a bunch of ad-
hoc systems that aren't in any way cross-referenced.

Nobody wants to be the sysadmin of their own junk drawer, but I for one don't
want years' worth of my stuff locked into somebody's Cloud du Jour.

(Then again, I have this same problem with actual paper documents, so maybe
it's just me.)

~~~
dangoor
I have had very similar thoughts, but I have to wonder if it turned out to be
wrong. Jerry's Brain:

[http://jerrysbrain.com/](http://jerrysbrain.com/)

Apparently started in TheBrain in 1997 and now has more than 250K "thoughts".
That's breathtaking for both the longevity and the scale. I'm guessing that
most mind mapping programs wouldn't handle that well.

Gathering the legacy stuff is not as important as getting started with
something, I think. The legacy will make it into a new system as it's needed.

I've been using Evernote for a number of years. I don't particularly _like_ it
(cumbersome UI without great navigation), but the search has worked well
enough for me to find things and its ubiquity has been great.

~~~
dangoor
Following up to my own point: products come and go all the time and it seems
like luck that Jerry happened to pick a product that stuck around. It does
seem unfortunate to have to risk your outboard brain on luck!

------
karmacondon
I've been working with own "PK" for about a year now. It's been an interesting
experiment so far. My concept is based around random re-exposure to
information. For whatever reason, the thought of "Let me look through my old
bookmarks" never occurred to me and wasn't part of my daily workflow. So one
aspect of my system is that it randomly selects bookmarks from different
categories every day and shows them to me. It also has spaced repetition for
facts and miscellany, or things I'm trying to learn about (like the US
Presidents or Shakespeares plays), vocabulary, etc.

There were a few interesting things I've noticed by randomly viewing old
bookmarks. The first is that linkrot is a very real thing and the web is
decaying at a measurable rate. Second, it's amazing how limited my memory is.
Half the time I don't remember something I bookmarked from years or even
months ago _at all_. It's new to me, all over again. I'm going to bookmark
this discussion and then completely forget it existed within a few months at
most. Regularly reviewing old web pages and notes makes me feel like my mind
is a sieve, as well as highlighting how my interest and thought processes have
changed over the years.

I'm really interested in this topic, feel free to contact me to discuss.

~~~
zzzmarcus
A friend showed me [http://gethibou.com/](http://gethibou.com/) yesterday.
Basically the idea seems to be that you bookmark a page, highlight what you
want to remember and they use spaced-repetition to help you remember it. It
might go along well with the PK that you created yourself.

~~~
brianclements
As a Workflowy user, I needed a way to do this and found it in the Colt[1]
add-on for firefox. I use the following custom formats to insert tabs and
newlines and it produces pretty slick bookmarks in Workflowy's bullet style
for me.

Standard bookmark with optional quote via highlighting:

    
    
        %T %N %B %U %N %L %N %?[S{"%S"}]
    

Long form quote:

    
    
        via %U%N%L%N%N%?[S{"%S"}]
    

Long form quote with annotations:

    
    
        #note via %U%N%L%N%N%?[S{"%S"}]%N----%N
    

If I highlight your post and use the first template, it displays as:

    
    
        The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases | Hacker News
            https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739227
            12/18/2015, 10:04:11 AM
            "A friend showed me http://gethibou.com/ yesterday. Basically the idea seems to be that you bookmark a page, highlight what you want to remember and they use spaced-repetition to help you remember it. It might go along well with the PK that you created yourself."
    
    

[1][http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt](http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt)

------
gkya
Org-mode. A benevolent beast. Once one gets to learn it, it can be made to do
anything. Also having a programming language shared with the runtime and other
programmes for that runtime (Elisp and Emacs) is just priceless, it just lends
itself to be customized in whichever way one would like. A major con for me,
though, is the lack of decent iOS-Android integration.

~~~
NhanH
My main problem with org-mode is the lack of good display for math notations
as well as multimedia (picture/video etc). Did I miss something that I can use
with it?

~~~
gkya
AFAIK it's possible to use $$ -- $$ for math notation, it exports to
LaTeX/MathJax etc, and there's a setting for making it to preview within the
buffer (the function is "org-latex-preview-fragment"). And there is very good
latex integration, support for latex blocks etc. I do not know the details
tho, I'm not a maths guy.

If you set

    
    
      #+OPTIONS: inlineimages
    

you'll see links to local images inline in the buffer. IDK, if video is
possible, but I think no.

------
bachmeier
In my opinion, this is not a "problem" that can be solved. What makes
something good varies a lot from one person to the next. In my case, I'd need
a way to hold equations, computer code, PDF versions of papers, handwritten
notes that someone else has given me, and a lot of other things. I want it
stored in a Git repo. I want to view it in a browser. I want it to be
convenient and I want it automated. The "answer" is a feature-filled scripting
language that allows you to build a customized solution.

~~~
civilian
What about it would you want automated?

What kind of scripts would you add to your personal knowledgebase?

~~~
bachmeier
It's not so much what I would want automated as what I have already automated.
As an example, consider how I handle notes that I leave for myself as I'm
working. These are things like paragraphs to be added to a paper, ideas for a
research topic, a list of things I have to do around the yard, or anything not
directly related to the task at hand.

I have written a script in D (my programming language of choice). I have a web
interface to all of the notes I've jotted down in the past. I can click a
topic and see all notes related to that topic. I click the new note button,
and it opens Emacs with the file that will hold the note. I type in a note in
markdown, and as soon as I close Emacs, the note is converted to html. If I
want to change it, I hit the edit button, Emacs opens up, and I make my edits.
Upon closing Emacs, the html is rebuilt. Anytime I create a new note or edit
an existing note, there is a commit to the Git repo.

That's what I mean by automated. I write scripts that handle everything except
the content of the notes. I have written or am writing scripts for just about
everything I do.

------
oxplot
How about Camlistore by Brad Fitzpatrick [1]:

"Camlistore is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for
modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC
era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it
via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem."

[1]: [http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)

~~~
epaulson
Camlistore is where I'm expecting to go. They've got some basic things modeled
in their world, and the rest I'll fill in using inspiration from schema.org.

My plan is to land PDFs of research papers, web bookmarks (and archives of
those pages), ebooks, book scans, textfiles/markdown documents, imports of
social networks (favorites from Twitter, mostly) and scans of written notes I
make to myself in Camlistore. From there, sync to devices and publish to the
web as appropriate.

I don't expect that I'll ever find the time to build this all myself, so I'm
hopeful that either my data will be in a format that other Camlistore apps can
read, or if I get the format wrong I'll be able to write a translator to
whatever the Camlistore community decides to model for that specific data
type.

------
herge
My saving grace at work has been the tidily wiki
([http://www.tiddlywiki.com](http://www.tiddlywiki.com)). It's the easiest
place to put one-off shell command line snippets, or instructions or whatever.
It's search is fast, and the formatting is nice. The only downside is I have
to remember to save and copy the downloaded file to google drive every time I
edit anything.

~~~
ahnick
Yeah tiddlywiki is by far my preferred way of storing this type of
information. Coupled with a FreeNAS box I can't really think of a better way
to store this type information.

~~~
eponeponepon
I never managed to get tiddlywiki working right - pity, because I really
wanted it to work for me, but couldn't seem to get to a stage where I'd trust
it to have saved something when it said it had.

This was five years ago at least, mind - I've no idea what the problem
might've been, and even if it wasn't user error, I suppose it might've
evaporated by now.

(note to self: try tiddlywiki again soon)

------
zwischenzug
I have a git repo with notes on all the things I'm interested in, a few larger
files (some books I always reference, some images etc.).

Over time I've built up some scripts to help with general tasks, eg list TODOs
etc.. It's perfectly moulded to my needs. For example, when I find a new
utility I run mk_notes.sh [thing], which sets up three files:

    
    
      - links (for relevant web links)
      - thing.txt (which has basic info about it)
      - cheat_sheet.txt (which has quick useful things I want to keep)
    

These files suffice for the majority of cases. I used to have more, but found
that was over-engineered.

I'm not sure I could buy such a thing, and if I did, I'd get irritated with
some aspect of it sooner or later.

Search is easy (grep et al), git means it's available everywhere (for me).

It's literally changed my life, since I now don't 'lose' any research, and can
pick up threads later and build.

~~~
eeZi
That sounds a lot like the org-mode concept.

~~~
zwischenzug
Interesting; a quick glance at the home page, and it looks like it's for
planning. I'm happy using JIRA for that, where I have customized workflows.
But again, this is just because I'm familiar with JIRA, not because it's
necessarily the best tool.

Also, I'm a vi user :)

~~~
eeZi
That's not mutually exclusive - see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739693)

Most people use it for planning, but it's also a very nice personal wiki. The
great thing is that you can define your tasks inline, if you want.

------
mapgrep
I don't think he's talking about a personal knowledgebase, I think he's
talking about something else we are very familiar with. Think about it, he
says a PK is "any system that you use to store and retrieve general
information Unlimited size... just about everything you want to save for your
whole life."

That's a computer, full stop. Or, in software terms, an operating system. In
storage terms, a filesystem. These high level tools are designed precisely for
the tasks he outlined: Handle data of ever increasing size reliably; make it
easy to navigate and search; be simple to use, convenient and fast, and
structured.

Where operating systems and filesystems fall down is in searching heterogenous
data in a powerful way, and that's where people turn to PKs. Evernote is/was
good at searching text and even pictures of text and for tagging; "the Brain"
is apparently good at cataloging structured to-do and project type data; Kumu
seems to do social graphs; inforapid seems to specialize in process
descriptions.

There is no reason operating systems can't get better at processing this data
natively. Apple has slouched in that direction in fits and starts with
projects like Spotlight and Quick Look. Microsoft once fantasized about
building a filesystem from a relational database and has developed an
interesting system of "search contracts" for Windows.

~~~
zzzmarcus
OP here. I mostly agree with you. If the filesystem was better at a few things
then it'd be the ideal PK. Right now though it isn't enough.

It's too slow or too inconvenient for most things you'd want in a PK. Creating
files isn't fast or easy. Usually you need to open some other app to do it,
even if it's just a terminal. Linking one file to another and showing the
connection with metadata like the direction of the link is possible, but not
easy, especially if you want multiple links to and from a file. You can sync
with things like Dropbox, but search is painfully slow and viewing/editing
files means opening a different app. It's just cumbersome.

The reason I like TheBrain is actually because it's good for much more than
todos and project data. I have one "file" that has over 10 thousand notes in
it. It's organized arbitrarily by my preference, but definitely structured,
searchable and "infinitely" expandable. The best part though is that it's
really easy to visualize related data in TheBrain. In fact, as I've read
comments today, I've come to realize that that is the one crucial thing most
PK's are missing. There aren't good visualizations for Evernote, OneNote, most
filesystems, org mode, etc.

I"m with you, there's no reason the filesystem can't become the best PK, but
it's far from that now.

------
nwatson
I like Evernote for a lot of personal stuff, though that's one of the "worser"
systems OP lists. Atlassian's Confluence does very well at being a wiki and
though you're hostage perhaps to your original layout / organization, at
$10/year for self-hosted it's a very good deal. It can store and index PDF,
Word, Excel, etc., documents very well. I don't think it does handwriting
recognition.

If I were to evolve the product category I'd use Confluence as a basis.

In fact I'd want to toy with using Confluence (+ Postgres backend) as the
basis for any I.T.-related product -- write plugins for user input, generate
all reports to Confluence. I'm not sure what licensing restrictions might be
but Confluence provides a lot of useful UI for $10/year (structured +
unstructured) for any customer, and building on top of that seems like a no-
brainer. Perhaps this is what others do with Drupal and other CMS products,
though ... I'm not familiar with that model.

~~~
djur
I'm surprised to read this. Confluence is the most unpleasant "wiki" product
(its lack of support for redlinks prevents me from really considering it a
wiki) I have ever used. Its built-in hierarchical structure for pages is
excessively intrusive and undercooked at the same time, and the search is so
bad that I have had it fail to pull up pages when I typed in the literal,
complete title.

Like most Atlassian products, its only apparent notable quality to me is that
it integrates with other Atlassian products, as well as being a semi-
functional platform on which to pile plugins and customization. It's possible
that there's a good Confluence install out there, probably administered by the
same people who run that really nice JIRA instance that people claim to have
used once.

~~~
eponeponepon
Confluence is... okay. I think Atlassian have successfully managed to sand
down a lot of the sharp corners on older wiki-type packages that tend to act
as a barrier to the non-technical types - from my perspective, that seems to
mean that my non-technical colleagues can be persuaded to contribute to
documents held in Confluence _markedly_ more easily than to contribute to a
MediaWiki instance that we previously had.

So, while Confluence itself as a piece of software makes me grumble more often
than not, I'm more than happy to trade that off against the easier sell to
others.

------
irln
I've found that using google docs works well if you frame the document title
in the form of a question or statement: \- What is a JavaScript constructor?
\- making rvm permanent in rvspec \- postgresql listing, creating and dropping
a db

Some of the "answers" are just a single line. Then all I have to remember is
either something in the title or the gist of the thing I need to know and
google docs search provides me with a list of related stuff.

------
Alex3917
In my opinion, FreeMind is the best solution currently out there because of
forces mindmapping conventions and places a strong emphasis on folding. A lot
of other solutions I've seen are more like concept maps, which are great for
project management, but not great for knowledge bases.

[http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page](http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

(The one thing of note is that there is a bug in the default version of OS X
Java, so it frequently crashes unless you update to Java 8 and edit the config
to use that version of Java.)

~~~
jpfed
>A lot of other solutions I've seen are more like concept maps, which are
great for project management, but not great for knowledge bases.

I've never understood this preference; would you be willing to explain it? It
seems almost exactly backward to me: I model tasks as trees of sub-tasks, and
knowledge as a general graph of connected concepts.

~~~
Alex3917
So all knowledge can be seen as connected, but all knowledge can also be put
into hierarchies. Concepts and how those concepts are related is something
that people come up with, rather than being an inherent property of the
universe.

The idea of forcing yourself to put knowledge into hierarchies is that it
makes your thinking more clear, makes it easier to remember where things are,
and perhaps paradoxically makes it easier to see how things are related. (Or
at least highlights certain types of relationships that are only visible in
the context of hierarchies.)

I'll admit it's pretty weird at first to only get one root node, I think it
took me a couple years to get used to that. But once I embraced it the
benefits quickly became clear.

------
massysett
I'm surprised he does not mention email. This is my personal knowledgebase. It
keeps boatloads of receipts and travel reservations from years ago. It is
available on all my computing devices. It's Gmail so it's easy to search and I
don't have to spend time sorting it. I write notes and send them to myself
just so I will have them in the email. Other people are also obsessive about
keeping their old email so I can't possibly be alone in this regard.

Gmail nails most of the features on his list.

~~~
jdmichal
I set up a filter on my Gmail that automatically tags emails from myself with
"Notes". Extremely easy to add a note anywhere -- just email myself from my
phone. Easy to search -- just add "in:Notes" to the criteria.

Only thing it doesn't really cover is linking between notes. Though I wonder
exactly how valuable that is anyway, when you have a powerful search
available.

------
alistproducer2
I was once a warrior on the PK front. I built a PK Chrome extension called
Deeper History [http://lifehacker.com/deeper-history-searches-the-
contents-o...](http://lifehacker.com/deeper-history-searches-the-contents-of-
visited-pages-1502340820). It compressed and stored pages you visted in
IndexDB. You could then search your history by keyword form your url bar. An
example use case was trying to recall a comment of an article you liked. If
you could remember a few of the words DH would pull it back up.

I stopped developing it once I realized it was a security nightmare. I built a
version that encrypted the data before storing it but that ballooned the DB
size and I also didn't have a user-friendly way for users to obtain a key set.

------
ianstormtaylor
This is the problem that Dropbox Paper is solving—both for teams and for
personal use. I use it now to write all of my blog posts, store research about
everyday life things, and keep track of things like doctors, lawyers, etc. I
think it solves the problem very well.

Early on they hadn't quite nailed "findability", but with the new (more
generic) folders ported from the desktop metaphor and "starred" items this is
largely solved. And the search is very fast.

Not only that, but it makes it incredibly easy to share with friends and even
have them comment or contribute to individual files, without having to expose
everything you write. Learning curve is near-zero.

All in all, super impressed.

------
pullo
Evernote. Free and accessible across many devices. For me it has been best of
the worst. It has been my one place to store all information. Evernote serves
well as a general knowledge base, but fails for storing programming snippets
and ideas.

------
siavosh
Co-founder of Faqt, mentioned in the blog post. The lack of good options is
what drove us to create our own solution, with our primary/religious focus
being on simplicity. At the risk of self-promotion, we have been quietly beta
testing with several organizations a collaborative/team version. If you'd like
to try it, there's a free signup at
[https://app.faqt.co/team/signup](https://app.faqt.co/team/signup)

Let me know if anyone has any question: hello@faqt.co

------
cdumler
I commented on Discus the site, as well. I've been a long time user of
DEVONthink. It can be used for many purposes, including document organizer,
email, GTD, tagging, etc. My favorite feature has always been the Magic Hat,
which will suggest under what folders a document should be filed. I clip most
interesting web pages, and it is surprisingly accurate once you have
established a few documents.

[http://www.devontechnologies.com](http://www.devontechnologies.com)

~~~
look_lookatme
I agree, it's great. I just wish DEVONthink had a better iOS client.

------
msluyter
I've been using nvAlt for a while. Very fast search and ease of use. Not sure
how well it scales in the long run but thus far I've had no problems.

Edit to add: Some other interesting features. You can sync to Simplenote
automatically, and notes can be saved as text files for easy import/export.
There is some markdown support (though I see a number of bugs in the preview).
The main downsides appear to be: limited color schemes, no syntax highlighting
for markdown, development appears to have stalled.

------
Razengan
I use Markdown notepads like Quiver [1] and Ulysses [2] to get a "pretty view"
on my existing plaintext hoard and directory structure.

This lets my data remain portable and still gives me (almost) all the niceties
of proprietary formats/editors.

[1]: [http://happenapps.com/#quiver](http://happenapps.com/#quiver)

[2]: [http://ulyssesapp.com/mac/](http://ulyssesapp.com/mac/)

------
lewisl9029
I just came across this a few days ago on HN:

[https://youtu.be/VZQoAKJPbh8?t=2818](https://youtu.be/VZQoAKJPbh8?t=2818)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726536)

Eve, the new "programming" tool developed by Chris Granger of Light Table
fame, looks absolutely amazing for this use case. I personally can't wait to
try it out.

------
eponeponepon
I'm inclined not to see this as surprising. There are as many ways in which
people conceptualise their 'offline' knowledge as there are people, and there
is never going to be one size to fit all.

Org-mode is probably the closest contender, if only for its sheer flexibility
- but the fact that it's wed to something (i.e. emacs) that the gen-pop would
immediately recoil from is only ever going to limit its adoption to a tiny
subset.

------
anotheryou
I'm using:

\- markdown

\- + folders (synced to my mobile)

\- + a flat-file cms to wrap it up in the browser (in my case: yellow cms, but
there are a few based on markdown and I could switch any time)

Still problematic:

\- fast and easy linking

\- suggested tags (no body likes tagging manually)

\- rich media (especially as you'd ideally want a local mirror, like some
research tools do it)

and the general problem:

\- text is linear

\- folders mostly hierarchic

\- information is ribosomal

\- ribosomal connections are rather associative and therefore manifold

\- manifold structures are a pain in the ass to do manually by linking and
tagging

An even better google would be the solution:

\- you just dump information (+ meta data to give some more context and spare
you explaining the current event surrounding the note)

\- and it will be found on demand by AI

maybe in a few years I can feed something my wiki and it will make sense of it

------
stealthascope
A couple years ago, I decided to setup a MediaWiki installation, and found it
works well enough for storing thoughts/ideas/things. I added another sort of
'navigation' layer that makes sense in my head, and wrote a desktop app in
python to use my navigation layer instead of the links. Eventually I would
like to set it up to scan for links in the various pages, download the content
then add it to a job queue to be parsed into a more concise format for the
wiki itself.

I don't use it nearly as much as I should... it's one of those things that's
90% what I want, and just missing the last 10%.

------
howeyc
Any reason a bunch of text files in directories wont work?

Any "advanced" text editor that can search directories should work:
Notepad++,Vim,grep,... anything really.

I've been using a bunch of synced markdown files. Works for me, I just have a
Markdown editor and a "grep-like" app for android. I'm not sure what you can
do for iPhone though. When I've talked to people they couldn't seem to "browse
for files/folders" which I thought was strange.

The one thing I'm missing is I'd like to "tag" my notes. I haven't decided
how/if I'm going to do that yet.

~~~
zzzmarcus
One of the main reasons for using a personal knowledgebase is surfacing
patterns in what you've saved. If there is no way of visualizing the
relationship between notes/nodes outside of a flat list, pattern finding is
limited to what you can remember to search for.

Basically the core problem isn't saving and searching for data, it's having
great ways to structure and visualize it.

~~~
howeyc
Good point, unless I know a search term it doesn't work out great.

I've been thinking of switching to some kind of wiki format, like maybe
creole. Then finding an app that can understand links between files or
something.

------
ckluis
Amen. I currently use txt files & Tree 2 (mac app).

I’ve tried Quiver, Quip, & Workflowy and cannot find the perfect app to suit
this space for my usage patterns. I’m almost 100% back to text files & sublime
text.

~~~
dheera
The problem is really that every time something new and better comes around,
it becomes a mess to port everything over, especially if it is conceptually
different (e.g. tag-based or something else). Dying products also seldom give
you a convenient means to export your content. So ultimately the only thing
that can last for decades, be cross-platform, and not be tied to one company's
product, is text files and directories. For now, throw it all on Dropbox,
Github, or whatever you like. When Dropbox and Github die, the file-directory
structure will be easy to port to whatever is next.

~~~
daviross
This has been my current approach for a while, after exporting everything out
of Tiddlywiki when it looked like that was dying for a while (Browser support
drying up, etc).

Now that it's been revived with Tiddlywiki5 and development's picked back up,
I'm somewhat tempted to get back into it. Main advantage: Better crosslinking,
rich content, etc. Main disadvantage: Less simple to edit, some tedium to
export.

I'd love to have a Tiddlywiki-like frontend to a set of Markdown text
documents backing it. (This is something that's been gnawing at the back of my
mind long enough that I might have to buckle down and make it myself) Maybe
Markdown + JSON for rich content data...

~~~
dheera
Where I need markup, I've been sticking to HTML or LaTeX syntax for the most
part.

Partly because I hate Markdown due to its inconsistent syntax (that's my
personal opinion), but also because it feels like a fad of recent years, much
like a successor of the MediaWiki fad and the BBcode fad. I feel like in
another 2 or 3 years someone will invent Markleft or Markright or Visual
Markdown#.NET 2.0 or Dustindown that's 10 times better than Markdown, and then
I'll have to switch everything over yet again.

HTML and LaTeX on the other hand, aren't dying any time soon due to their
extensive deployment, and I'm confident that my syntax will be renderable for
at least another 10 years or more.

~~~
ta0967
i'm not sure you'd consider it better markdown (i do), but do you know about
reStructuredText? it seems to even predate markdown.
[http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickstart.htm...](http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickstart.html)

------
limeyy
Anyone Remember Neonem on Windows? Well, that was really good for organising
personal info in a structured way. Discussion here seems too broad: comparing
Evernote (which is basically losely structured), wiki's etc to real classic
outliners that once were thriving on Windows in he old days but kind of have
of have been forgotten the past years. If you search for "outliner" you'll
find some good all abandoned Windows projects.

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eeZi
I, too, am an org-mode fan, but there are a few good ones missing:

\- Zim ([http://zim-wiki.org/](http://zim-wiki.org/), Open Source)

\- WikidPad
([http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/](http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/), Open
Source)

\- ConnectedText
([http://www.connectedtext.com/](http://www.connectedtext.com/), Windows-only,
$$$)

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xenihn
Quiver in my iCloud is the best thing that I've found so far. One of the
biggest things for me is support for code snippets /highlighting, without
having to use something to convert to RTF in-between copy and paste. Sadly, I
stopped using it since I now have to log in to my company iCloud and Apple
accounts at work, and it's just too much of a hassle to switch back and forth.
I mainly use OSX notes and Textmate now.

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dangoor
Chris Granger's latest experiments with Eve (github.com/witheve) look
surprisingly like a semi-structured personal knowledge system.

Take a look at the last 15 minutes or so of this video for a demo:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8)

(the whole video is interesting for the evolution of it)

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arvind_devaraj
An automated tool for capturing and sharing knowledge will truly make the
world a better place. Learning can be faster , reducing the cost of education.
People across the globe can connect based on topics of interest and knowledge,
yielding more economic and job opportunities.

A personal knowledge base is far more valuable than what it might seem at
first glance. Very happy to see you have articulated clearly and made people
realize it. A PKB has great potential for knowledge transfer within
organization or even at research labs for new people to familiarize with
literature. Many people want to capture their thoughts for writing a book
someday, but current tools aren't good enough for this. Sadly, a person's
social graph is well captured today rather than their knowledge graph.

With these thoughts, I started implementing Hyperbook - www.getbook.co few
months back. Currently it is in beta and really working hard to improve it
every day. We got good feedback and reviews from thought leaders in content
curation and knowledge management industry. Thanks for bringing the problem
for discussion. It gives me motivation that is very much a worthy problem to
solve.

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zeveb
I've gotta say that org-mode and a git repo do pretty well by me for this kind
of thing.

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PaulHoule
I use Microsoft's OneNote for this. The search works amazingly well and is
fast.

~~~
howeyc
I've been tempted by this, but I have some reservations:

1\. Does it work under less-used OSs? Linux/BSD..?

2\. Is it a proprietary format? Will you be able to open the file in a decade?
My text files will be able to be opened, I'm not sure anyone can still open
their MSWorks files.

Maybe I'm crazy to worry about opening these files after a decade since using
them probably isn't worth while unless you keep up with it. However, I've got
files from the 90's that I've been transitioning from machine-to-machine since
storage costs keeps getting cheaper.

~~~
eeZi
No, and yes. It's proprietary and Windows/Android/iOS-only.

~~~
PaulHoule
That's false, you can download documentation for the OneNote file format here

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dd924743\(v=office.12\).aspx)

it is only about 5% of the size of the Adobe PDF specification and I am sure
there are corner cases, but it is not too bad.

~~~
eeZi
I admittedly did not know that they published a specification . It's still a
proprietary file format though. Proprietary does not mean "binary and
undocumented", it means that it's not an open standard.

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space_ghost
I've been using Zim ([http://zim-wiki.org](http://zim-wiki.org)) for several
years, backed up to Dropbox. It's a significant improvement over plain text
files.

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pfista
Does anyone have a system for managing their relationships? Kind of like CRM
but on a personal level. Keeping track of people's details - like their
family, their passions, their history etc.

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Treycent
Knowledge can be captured in wikis, notes, documents, videos, audio, and even
photos. Our smartphone/smartwatch/web apps allow you to access any of the
knowledge using a single, easy to use interface - voice. Basically, you tag
content with a voice command (e.g. "to do list" or "show me the video on how
to do xyz") then, whenever you need to retrieve the knowledge, just speak the
command. Voice commands can be shared and the apps are all free.

[https://youtube.com/treycent/search?query=notes](https://youtube.com/treycent/search?query=notes)

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newman314
I used to use Delicious but that didn't solve the "search the content of my
bookmarks" problem for me.

I've been using Pocket for now and it seems to work fine.

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hackercomplex
imho the best one ever made is called getguru.com. It's brilliant actually but
the team there has priced themselves out of the market charging $7/head as a
b2b app because they're from and enterprise sales background and therefor
don't realize guru's monster potential in consumer-web. They're happy taking
the low hanging fruit $$ from call-centers.

 _sigh_

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dalacv
I like trunknotes ([http://www.trunknotes.com/](http://www.trunknotes.com/))

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cypherg
Confluence for the simple win

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pjc50
OneNote?

~~~
douche
I've become a big fan. With the OneNote clipper extension for Chrome, it's how
I bookmark everything I might want to read later.

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utopiah
several instances of PmWiki + Vimperator, being using that for nearly 10 years
and thousands of edits so far

