Comment by fphhotchips | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fphhotchips | Hacker News Reader

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I think I come at this problem the opposite way to everyone that actually builds these products/tools. I want to mindmap and brainstorm all of the topics, and then take notes on them - preferably with a time component to that. Even more than that, I want to be able to take notes on the relationships between nodes, since that's where the real gold tends to be.

Mindmap tools generally don't work for this because they want a single topic for each map, and all the words on the one page. KM/KB tools don't work because I can't just draw the relationships between the points, I have to go in and actually create notes that I then get to visualise.

I really wanted to like Obsidian, but the way it treats folders puts me right off. I tried Neo4j Bloom, but there are UI difficulties and it's not really great for notes. I'd build it myself but I have no idea where I'd even start on a UI.

I'm the same way. Mindmaps are by far the best tooling for how I think. They're also just not portable. I keep trying. It would be awesome if mind maps could be united with a console somehow, so that I could inject things from "wherever".

I've spent a lot of time caring about KM/KB and can't settle on anything that survives more than 2 years. What do you do today?

I keep everything in a combination of OneNote and Google Sheets, which I link back to Salesforce with the Salesforce connector for Google Sheets. It is... not perfect, but spreadsheets were the only way I could find to quickly get the information down that I wanted to.

This is the combination of things that originally led to my loving TagSpaces. I wanted local files that I could edit, have folders of varying file types, and include documents in the folders, opening as needed. Part of the issue was that I then wanted to link to, and from varying files... basically a knowledge base that was independent on data types.

Turns out that image capture, and document sync was the least of my problems. The mind maps, image data not being OCRed, and other things became a pain.

I once built a mind map with a “MUSH” interface (text-based, where you traverse the map “on ground level” as a character). You avoid information overload by showing the synopsis as you “enter” a node, then you could say `e[xamine] here` to view the whole text.

Traversal is quicker than you’d think, and it would likely work well on mobile devices.

It was years ago, but I still think about making that in to something “real”.

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