Since so many of you complained about my Daily Twits posts, I decided to remove it. Now you can see Latest Twits in the sidebar on the right. These are up to date, which makes more sense than daily round-up.
Thank you all for feedback and patience.
This post is somewhat related to my previous rant “The mess with notes“.
One of the things that I lost control of are my bookmarks. At one point in time I decided that my bookmarks are the same as, or rather a part of, my notes. And I started to treat them the same way. And they ended up in the mess together with my notes. But I was wrong.
Bookmarks can be managed rather nicely with one of the many web services out there. I always enjoyed the way del.icio.us does that and I don’t know what got into me, that I stopped using it. Actually, no, I know. I stopped using del.icio.us when I messed up all my bookmarks. No surprise there.
The thing that got terribly wrong with my bookmarks was tagging. Tagging is still a concept that many people try to put their heads around, but a few years ago it was even worse. I like tagging in that it does not require any strict hierarchy. But my mistake was thinking that tagging does not require strict rules.
Without strict rules it’s very easy to end up in the mess. In a mess that I am in right now. For example, I started tagging RSS related pages with “aggregator”, “aggregators”, “feed”, “feeds”, “xml”, “rss”, “atom”. That’s just too much. And later I started worrying that I won’t find some bookmark unless I tag it with all of those. My tags grew like mushrooms after rain.
What I should have done is tag bookmarks with as specific tags as possible. If the page is about RSS, it should be tagged with “rss”, not with “aggregators” and “xml” and “feeds”. “blogging” is about the worst tag ever. It’s too generic. It should be either “wordpress” or “writing” or “seo” or something like this.
But I’m going to fix that. I’m removing all bundles, tags, and bookmarks from my del.icio.us account right now (gotta love Perl for things like Net::Delicioius). They are too messed up even for me to use. I’ll start from scratch. And I’ll see where it’ll get me.  And this time around, I’ll try to use descriptions too. They are much more helpful than I thought or cared for originally.
I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I am in search for the perfect note taking application. I’ve tried everything and anything and I’m still not satisfied. Some of the things that I tried to work with include: pen and paper, Google Notebook, knotes, TomBoy, Basket, text files, and GMail. Each of these has its pros and cons.
Pen and paper is by far the easiest to use. No learning curve, great flexibility (text, pictures, charts, mind maps, etc), color support, mobile, etc. Google Notebook and Basket provide for nice organization of notes into books and chapters. knotes and TomBoy are one key press away, integrated with the desktop, faster than any online application, and look cool like the yellow sticky notes. GMail helps to keep everything together, in one place, and has great search, and is easy as easy to use as email can be. Text files have the greatest flexibility as they can be processed by all those command line tools…
And still, I’m not happy.
After thinking more about it, I guess the issue is not in the applications, but in myself. I am trying to centralize as much stuff as possible, keep it all in one location, and that create plenty o’mess. No matter how good the search is or how nicely the application organizes notes, after using it for just a few days I end up with many lose ends, which I have no way to control.
It reminds me of an argument album people often have with tag people. When organizing images, some people love hierarchies, which are easy to do with albums (and sub-albums, and so forth). Others hate hierarchy and just tag the heck out of their pictures. You can have as many tags attached to the picture as you want and that makes it easier to find. To some. Flickr made something equally good for both groups, and for the smaller third group which doesn’t even know what it wants. You can tag, you can put pictures in sets (albums), you can organize sets into collections (albums of albums). Each picture can have plenty tags, can belong to many sets, and each set can belong to many collections. And there is a search on top of that (tags, titles, descriptions). And there is archive browsing by date. And there are favorites, RSS feeds, and more.  It’s difficult to imagine an organization of images which cannot be supported by Flickr.
But images are a well defined format. And it helps a lot that hardware and software that create or modify images usually provide plenty of meta data – date and time, equipment type, versions, sizes, thumbnails, settings, locations, etc.
Notes are not as well defined. Sometimes notes are short pieces of texts. Sometimes images. Sometime images with text. Sometimes links. Sometimes videos or sounds. The length can vary a lot – from a couple of words to a few pages. Sometimes they need titles, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I write notes myself, while other times I quote somebody. Yet at some others I quote somebody with my notes. Most of the times notes are too short for me to spend a lot of time creating meta data (keywords, dates, etc).
That makes notes a difficult problem to solve. Separation seems like a good idea. But it easily gets out of control too. When I keep bookmarks in one place, favorite images in another, favorite quotes in another, it takes me a lot of time to find things. And then I get into conflicts as to where to file the note – if it’s a quote with a link, for example, should it go into quotes or links?
One thing I am still trying out is keeping notes in separate places and aggregating them all into a single location. For now I have two applications that somewhat help me handle this task – WordPress running my blog, and Google Reader. Again, both have pros and cons, an the whole approach is shaky. But I’m trying…
Am I the only one who has this problem?
After being way too busy for the last 8 month or so, I’m finally back to the gym. Today was my first day.
Notes: