Everyday, new tools for thought are launched. The personal knowledge management ecosystem is becoming incredibly complex. However, some visible trends are emerging: indie thinkers are making a living from conducting online research; tools are becoming more integrated; apps encourage active creation over passive collection of knowledge. This 40-page report reviews the current state of the …
I’m obsessed with thinking in maps: discovering and creating connections between ideas, adding nodes to a knowledge graph, finding patterns across distant areas of knowledge. However, the traditional way of exploring connections between research papers is fairly tedious: read the paper, scan the references, search for any relevant title, rinse and repeat. Connected Papers aims …
Read moreConnected Papers: a visual tool for academic research
While many people are raving about the functionality and user experience of Roam, some have complained in the past about the aesthetics of the note-taking app, which they found too barebone or not polished enough for their taste. The good news is: you can personalise the look of Roam with a custom CSS theme! If …
As a big fan of thinking in maps, I’m always curious about tools to lay out and connect ideas visually. Many people are not aware as this is a bit of a hidden functionality, but you can actually create diagrams in Roam. 1. Create the canvas. Type {{diagram}} and press enter. You can also type …
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital …
Notion finally launched a popular feature request: bi-directional links, which they call backlinks. While it may seem like a simple addition, it may fundamentally change the way Notion users interact with their database, and it makes Notion a valid digital gardening tool. Bi-directional links are a game changer because they allow for a completely new …
Read moreHow to use bi-directional links (backlinks) in Notion
The note-taking tools market is projected to reach $1.35B by 2026. The good thing is: there is a note-taking app for everyone. The not-so-great thing: with a new note-taking app popping up every single week, it can be hard to decide which one is the best for your use case. Before we dive into the …
The idea of artificial intelligence taking over the world is at least as old as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was published in 1818. Public figures such as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have warned us against the reckless creation of superintelligent machines. In June 2020, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory based in San Francisco, …
Many tools for thought offer a single-player experience centered on storing and retrieving information, and don’t integrate well with the biggest multiplayer platform of all time: the Internet. Part of the problem is that we have been idle when it comes to its foundation: the hyperlink. In more than 30 years, the way we link …
Roam is a note-taking tool for networked thought which I find incredibly powerful. One of the exciting aspects of using Roam is joining a community of curious minds interested in metacognition and thinking in maps. While Roam is a pleasure to use out of the box, this community has created many browser extensions to improve …