The outlining newcomers

Posted by Dr Andus
May 14, 2021 at 12:33 AM

Sometimes ideas just get translated into another medium.

And the fact that it was possible to translate them perhaps means that there are no silos.

I haven’t tried Obsidian, so I can’t comment on it, but Roam to me is essentially an online version of ConnectedText, a personal wiki, which itself was a translation of online wiki standards.

ConnectedText only worked on one PC at a time (it was possible to work across Dropbox but it could get messy, so I never went down that route).

A Roam account on the other hand allows you to have multiple instances and you can easily switch from machine to machine and one platform to another.

To me that is progress.

And as Franz said, the openness is there in terms of using conventions such as Markdown and even wiki links.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding Winer’s point. I liked OPML, but ultimately anything can become a standard, even something of very poor quality, if enough people adopt it (such as QWERTY).

So if Roam becomes a runaway success and everyone in the world will be using it, or a clone of it, well, it will set the standard, it won’t be a silo.