In a post titled The Memex Method Cory Doctorow notes that he thinks of his blog as a kind of commonplace book. It is a sort of digital journal where he collects whatever captures his attention and saves it for future use. The benefit that his blog gives him over a notebook or a PKM…
When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge. Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your…
I’ve read a number of posts recently questioning the whole idea of Personal Knowledge Management. These folks have tried a number of different tools and approaches and always seem to arrive at the same result – it’s a ton of work with little or no ROI. Without exception the writers say “I did all this…
In his chautauqua on being stuck Robert Pirsig identifies the cause of “stuckness” has having too many tasks at hand for your mind to process. His solution to get unstuck is “don’t try to force it, that will only get you more stuck.” But I think that’s only one form of being stuck, some kind…
DevonThink 3.0 is available right now as a free public beta. This is a great opportunity to give this Mac-based knowledge base an extended test-drive, seeing that you won’t have to pay a penny until the beta period ends some time this summer. Here’s the use-case for DevonThink: you write, study, or otherwise manage a…
I want to write faster. I want to write better. But I struggle with research in a way that’s more like hoarding than sense-making. The zettelkasten method of note-taking has given me a simple way to organize my research and bring a lot more clarity to the information I’ve collected. But I still get bogged…
Photo by Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK – Data Storage Device, CC BY 2.0, Link I stumbled across the zettelkasten note taking process while watching Beck Tench’s helpful Tinderbox series. Beck uses Tinderbox software to create a hyper-organized system of notes for her Ph.D. studies in contemplative practice and information science. Her method of managing these…
I wrote this article on the 101 freeway during the morning rush hour. To be completely honest I did some light editing and added links afterwards, but the bulk of the material was drafted while I was behind the wheel. Before I go too far, there are some risks to multitasking while driving even when…
For the past week I’ve been following sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow as he posts on BoingBoing. Here’s what I’ve learned: 1. Be prolific. Doctorow posts anywhere from eight to sixteen posts a day. 2. Use pictures. Doctorow almost always includes a picture and he’s meticulous about the attribution. 3. Quote the material. A fair use…
I am amazed, baffled and tremendously envious of people who can make even a fraction of their living by blogging. So I decided to do something about it. Starting this week I am going to try my hand at shadowing another blogger and learning what exactly it is that they do. What are their topics?…
In his book The Size of Thoughts, Nicholson Baker talks about some of the unexpected advantages of library card catalogs over databases: fingerprints for instance. Dark smudges of body oil can tell you at a glance which topics in the catalog are the most popular, something that would take a complex structured query to achieve…
As of 11 PM last night I became the proud owner of a 50,123 word steaming slag heap of a first draft novel. Yipee. So ends my NaNoWriMo adventure. What am I left with? Let’s call it the Winchester Mystery House of bad literature…hundreds of passages leading nowhere. I do have to say that this…
I’m on the road again. The road to hell, good intentions to blog my NaNoWriMo novel-writing experiment are lying like dead soldiers on the roadway. Early on I was going to post about Banging vs. Swooping. Kurt Vonnegut once said (and I swear I heard this on a public radio interview, though I can’t find…
Here it is, the eve before National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo,) sort of an ongoing joke started by Chris Baty where tens of thousands (150,000+ this year) of people line up like entrants of the Bay to Breakers marathon, and pound out 50,000 words of prose. This month I throw my hat in the ring,…
What kind of blog posts do you find the most compelling? A decade ago someone pointed out to me that the surest path to get on a best-seller list is to have “Ten Easy Ways to…” in your title. The Blog-o-sphere bears out this line of attack – list posts (ie “Merlin’s top 5 super-obvious,…
