i’m going to do it. i’m going to linkslut
steven johnson’s
new blog. and no, mrs. smarty pants, it’s not because everyone else
is doing it. it’s because he’s nicely summarized his note taking
“modes”, which ring true with my own behavior:
“But I think there’s something very smart in the
premise here, which is that note-taking is as distinct an activity
as creating a spreadsheet or a presentation, and thus deserves its
own application.Right now, I have about four separate ways that I take notes:
reading notes from books I’ve read as research; quick notes of
phone numbers or addresses; story or book ideas; interesting
bookmarks of things I’ve found on the web with commentary. Right
now, I use four different applications for those four tasks: I
store my research notes in a special format that’s searchable
online (more about that in another post); I jot down quick notes in
my email client, because it’s always open and is organized by time;
I keep my writing ideas in Word documents; and as of this week, I
keep my web findings here in MovableType.”
i used to be a prolific “jotter”, carrying
around 3×5 index cards overflowing with copious amounts of chicken
scratch and coded in 3 ink colors. in many ways, the
the vast wasteland
was an attempt to formalize this behavior in the context of “the
networked world.” indeed the
rhetoric quote i chose for conflux lo those many years ago reflects the thinking
to a certain degree:
“…[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to
assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the
“discovery” of the networked world. And there are surely lessons
for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took
centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline
museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to
any very tidy scheme of organization.”
at the time, i was thinking of ways that i
translate the notetaking into something a bit more coherent. an
evolving “cabinet of wonders”.
the irony? nobody but steven is going to remember that he wrote
those words. in hindsight, i should probably attribute them to him
instead of linking to a link to the original “feed” story that he
wrote entitled, “Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man” [incidently, i’d link to the original article but it went into link
rot hell long ago. ]
and it’s a little humbling to see this site remain much the same
over the years. analogous to prehistoric cave paintings caught
within the limits of the representation, not even coming close to
the complexity that the adept can achieve with a fresh 3×5 card and
3 pens while on the train after a trip to local bookstore – with a head overflowing with too many ideas.