ConnectedText versus Ndxcards

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 22, 2007 at 05:58 PM

What I meant isn’t that ndxcards already offers this, but that nothing keeps a program like ndxcards from adding such a feature. The automatic noticing of commonalities seems independent of the wiki format, unless I’m misunderstanding either you or CT. Evernote, as you previously noted, supplies this kind of instant information, using a system of hierarchical keywords. For me, this feature has yet to prove its value.

The main problem I have with undirected connections is, put baldly, everything is connected to everything else (except maybe those things existing outside of our light cone.

Given any two elements in an outline or text, any of us could easily find _some_ way they’re connected. Manfred’s idea that connections are like reference footnotes was helpful here. But it seems to me that if you constrain your use of connections that way, they no longer occupy a central role, as seems intended in a wiki. Those who effectively uses a wiki, must have some contraining concept concept (or maybe a very well-developed sense of proportion), so they connect only what is helpful to connect, i.e. less than everything to everything else.

A milder form of this criticism can be leveled against outlines. Inspiration’s concept maps and some of the modules in Axon feature concept maps, which are stronger than outlines/mindmaps, in that you not only subordinate nodes but label them substantively.

Many of the wiki-styled critiques of outlining, it seems to me, predate the availability of outliners with cloning, which I think obviates many of these criticisms. Hierarchy is equated with “rigid hierarchy.” If I remember correctly, the Mac OS X outliners have had a difficult time introducing cloning. This was regarded as something of an accomplishment with TAO. (I could be confusing this feature with another.) On Windows, until Ultra Recall got cloning, it was rare among outline-based free form databases. These days the same functionality is often implemented with hierarchical key words, as in Idea! and Evernote.It still is not a common feature, which contributes to the perception of a radical disjunct between wiki-style connection and outlining. Cloning is absent from all of the mind-mappers I’m familiar with (what about MindManager? - I don’t know if it has cloning.)

john oconnor wrote:
> >
>Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>>The immediate recognition of common key words seems
>independent of the wicki
>>approach of CT. Is that right? In principle, a program like
>ndxcards could have a
>>feature like this. Or so it would seem
> >
>In NDXcards you would
>have to stop what you were doing and run a separate search. How likely is that going to
>happen in practice. With Connectedtext you can quickly click on a keyword link to see
>what is already connected. The speed of seeing the connection and the ability to
>rapidly move between the connected ideas and to update them is something I would find
>useful.
> >John O’Connor