Re: Outlining and Fuzzy Thinking

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 860

Posted by nsweeney
2000-12-10 07:35:30

While I take Dave’s point on “sharp thinking”, I think the deficiency of the outliner paradigm is that it imposes sequential (“this, then this”) order on data, which doesn’t work too well if you’re wanting to build relations based upon lateral thinking: metaphorical connections, tangential parallels and so on. The Brain goes some way towards this, as does Inspiration, but the kind of mind-mapping tool I’d like to see needs an additional function: the ability to label and classify connections (“x is linked to y because…”, with no limit on connections). Actually, the best interface for this I’ve seen is Matt Webb’s Dirk, which is about as fuzzy as you can get in its current form, but which could easily be a useful mapping tool when run as a personal app.

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