Evernote 5 is here

Posted by 22111
Oct 10, 2013 at 03:34 PM

dan7000, this is a little bit off-topic, but since you brought it up.

Outlining not scaling well? This is not that exact, since in the end, file plans of big corporations, with million of documents, are outlines, but I know why you bring up the relation with web outlines. We have to distinguish: In the web, everybody wants to be, at good position, within such an outline. Yahoo paid people to do the selection; it was the beginnings of the web; Yahoo’s outline was extremely helpful then, but extremely cost-intensive for Yahoo, too, and prone to manipulation: the risk of rather badly-paid stuff, but paid well by people wanting to assure a good position for their product/service (the risk I say).

Now for a corporate outline structure, or for a corporate one, the criteria to position the thing is totally different from a public one: It’s the interest of the unique user, or of the corporation, that decides upon choice of entering, and then choice of level of prominence - in a public outline, those who want to be at some position within that outline, do NOT have the public’s interest in their mind, but their own, and solely their own, and this is even valid for people who don’t have anything to sell for a price, but even different universities crave for more prominent positioning there.

Now google does it with “weighting value”, the weighting process being very complicated, the the value biased by dollars going to google, partly (but not so much that the google system is invalidated by it, meaning the value for the “customer”, for the pc user searching, is always high enough so that some dollar-biasing can be accepted.

And google has/is the best search machine on earth; no compare with what you’ve got on your pc, which means if I say I never remember all the relevant search terms, my google searches are (mostly) successful notwithstanding, when my desktop search results are quite poor, at the same time; of course, this could be greatly enhanced by better desktop search tools.

But even then, we accept the google flat list of 100 or 300 search results, because it’s that or nothing; there are some tools out there that try to better GROUP those google results, and if I need some info, in context, from my info stuff, I get to just SOME of the relevant info there, and all the context is grouped around it, more or less well, which means whenever I need such context again and again, my efforts to group it in the most senseful way is justified, and I will have concise info there; whenever I just “import” something, in order to “read it again some later day” (which often never occurs, we all share this experience I think), all those entries are just put together as “siblings” in some sub-category, without really thinking about order or even “which ones should be the children of others, instead of their siblings”: So, my “level of ordering” is in fact a function of the utility of this ordering, which means in my system, putting something into some category or sub-category is not any more effort that your assigning something with 1 or 2 tags, so this is rather similar.

I have to say that I don’t do this “assignment to a category” by macros, so it’s really sped up - if you do it entirely manually, the often-heard argument that the effort/time to “categorize it” is not justified by its later use (which possibly never comes).

So, let’s not mix up outlines that serve an internal purpose, and outlines to which third-party interests assign things: the latter would be loaded with crap, when in fact the former are very uneven in “information quality”, but, as said, in direct consequence to the potential utility of things in one sub-category or in another : Here, the same people (or their staff) who then use the content, put the (relative) categorization effort into that same things.

In theory, you are not wrong: AI could perhaps do lots of this categorization work. Tagging is about cataloging, outlining ditto: In such a big, categorization outlining, it’s not so much the outline that is of interest, but then, the grouping of items within adjacent sub-categories within that big outline, and here, on this micro-level, tagging and outlining are quite similar, are quasi-brethren. That’s why hoisting, 3-pane design or other strategies for breaking up that “whole thing” are so important.

As for public outlines, I’ve said it here some weeks ago, the wikipedia.org organization is thinking about overlaying / about how to overlay a tree structure upon its wiki design, as an alternative for better “holding things together that belong together”, and it goes without saying that in such a structure, both individual items and headings/subheadings have to be amply cloned, in order to realize multiple contexts, and not just one principle one.