Discuss: compare zettlekasten, bookmarks, google

[Edward K. Ream]

Every since the original discussion of zettelkasten I have been wondering whether it might be useful in organizing my bookmarks. It certainly has drawn my attention to how I actually do organize my bookmarks.

Perhaps the discussion contains everything I need to know, but I think most people (including myself) will be too lazy to wade through it. What I remember about zettelkasten:

1. It is a technique for creating links between ideas.

2. There is a .leo file, which, heh, I was able to find without too much fuss, contains some @command nodes for creating links.

Often googling a topic is faster than using a bookmark, no matter how easy it is to find the bookmark.  Otoh, bookmarks remind me that something is worth googling!

What do you think, Amigos?

Edward

[Paul]

"Often googling a topic is faster than using a bookmark, no matter how easy it is to find the bookmark. Otoh, bookmarks remind me that something is worth googling!"

Ad hoc googling doesn't afford one the opportunity to structure knowledge as one builds understanding of a new subject. Nested bookmarks, with easy means of hierarchical reordering, afford a mental map of newly explored territory.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 3:00 PM Paul <pauls...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Often googling a topic is faster than using a bookmark, no matter how easy it is to find the bookmark.  Otoh, bookmarks remind me that something is worth googling!"

Ad hoc googling doesn't afford one the opportunity to structure knowledge as one builds understanding of a new subject. Nested bookmarks, with easy means of hierarchical reordering, afford a mental map of newly explored territory.

I'm willing to believe that :-) I would like a tutorial on how you would recommend using zettelkasten.

Edward

[Thomas Passin]

On Tuesday, July 7, 2020 at 10:55:42 AM UTC-4, Edward K. Ream wrote:

Every since the original discussion of zettelkasten I have been wondering whether it might be useful in organizing my bookmarks. It certainly has drawn my attention to how I actually do organize my bookmarks.

Often googling a topic is faster than using a bookmark, no matter how easy it is to find the bookmark.  Otoh, bookmarks remind me that something is worth googling!

What do you think, Amigos?

Ever since I wrote my bookmark manager in the 2004 time frame, I have gone back and forth between using it or googling for something.  I think that has a lot to do with the kind of results that Google (or DuckDuckGo, which I mostly use) returns. There is also the issue of whether you want to look for something new or not.

I don't find the hierarchical bookmark manager in any browser to be very useful.  If that's all I had, I'd probably hardly every bother to bookmark anything except for temporary purposes.  My program helps you find things, including unexpected links, in a way that browsers don't.  I have been thinking about how I could make the software useful for others.  That's been a difficult question for several reasons, among them my determination that the data be portable and not locking into one browser.  So far my only solution has been to use the file system, but browsers can't write directly to the file system.  My workaround uses a series of batch files to create the data that gets loaded into the browser.  This makes things hard for new users to just start using the system, and even harder to add annotations (for which I do provide a capability).

I have also been thinking about whether a zettelkasten could replace my bookmark manager.  I haven't settled this in my mind yet.  It is conceivable that code could be written that would analyze the outline structure of a zettlekasten and come up with a similar indexing system.  This is probably the approach I would favor.  This indexing system would be used along with more normal searching among full text and tags (I use rst :tag: lines in my zettel entries).

Actually, as important as the actual indexing system is coming up with a good way to present the results to the user.  In my browser bookmark manager, I use separate frames.  Yes, so 1990s, but they work really well in this case.

In my vision of marrying bookmarks with the zettelkasten, the bookmark entry would become just one kind of zettel among others.  IOW, I wouldn't expect to have a separate zettelkasten just for bookmarks.  There is no reason why a bookmark zettel couldn't be tagged as a bookmark, to let you search only among bookmarks if that's what you wanted to do.

TomP

[Thomas Passin]

On Tuesday, July 7, 2020 at 4:00:37 PM UTC-4, Paul wrote:

"Often googling a topic is faster than using a bookmark, no matter how easy it is to find the bookmark.  Otoh, bookmarks remind me that something is worth googling!"

Ad hoc googling doesn't afford one the opportunity to structure knowledge as one builds understanding of a new subject. Nested bookmarks, with easy means of hierarchical reordering, afford a mental map of newly explored territory.

Something that is not appreciated enough is that one's mental map changes over time, along with one's ideas about categorizing terms and ideas.  And these apparent hierarchies are usually not truly hierarchies - just because something has been slotted into an existing indented outline does not make it a proper member of any one hierarchy.  Over time, one often forgets exactly how some term had been categorized, and if it comes up again, the same term or idea may be fitted into some different structure instead.  This can make it hard to find related ideas, and is something I tried to provide for in my bookmark manager.

[Thomas Passin]

On Thursday, July 9, 2020 at 1:16:41 PM UTC-4, Thomas Passin wrote:

Something that is not appreciated enough is that one's mental map changes over time, along with one's ideas about categorizing terms and ideas.  And these apparent hierarchies are usually not truly hierarchies - just because something has been slotted into an existing indented outline does not make it a proper member of any one hierarchy.  Over time, one often forgets exactly how some term had been categorized, and if it comes up again, the same term or idea may be fitted into some different structure instead.  This can make it hard to find related ideas, and is something I tried to provide for in my bookmark manager.

The subject of searching for browser bookmarks is challenging because you only know two things from the bookmark itself: the URL and the page title.  Neither of them have much semantic content.  Most of the semantics has to come from the terms you use to file the bookmark.  But those terms aren't always stable over time.

For example, in my bookmark collection, I have many of my Python-related bookmarks listed under "Python".  But most of my javascript-related ones are under "Software/Languages/Javascript".  Why aren't they filed consistently, say using "Software/Languages/Python"? Who knows?  People aren't consistent, especially when they are filing bookmarks in a hurry.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 1:01 PM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Thomas, for your lengthy comments.

> The subject of searching for browser bookmarks is challenging because you only know two things from the bookmark itself: the URL and the page title.  Neither of them have much semantic content.  Most of the semantics has to come from the terms you use to file the bookmark.  But those terms aren't always stable over time.

Are any links/categories stable over time? I'm constantly adding/deleting bookmarks. That doesn't bother me much.

Also, it's possible to add some extra notes to bookmarks in the "tag" or "keywords" fields. I don't use those fields for searching or filtering, just for storing a bit of extra data.

Edward

[Thomas Passin]

On Friday, July 10, 2020 at 11:00:51 AM UTC-4, Edward K. Ream wrote:

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 1:01 PM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

Are any links/categories stable over time? I'm constantly adding/deleting bookmarks. That doesn't bother me much.

Probably not, and I've put some effort into making a system find things that may be related even of they end up getting filed under different categories (because of the passage of time, for example).

[Paul]

Some ideas may be stable and structured over eons of time - many ideas, if not most, are not.