IAnnotate Conference

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 14 May 2022 06:30
Open in Logseq
    • A conference on annotation and notetaking. I looked in on one panel on The Future of Notetaking that featured people from Roam and some of its variants/competitors.
    • Future of Notetaking
      • Ward Cunningham
        • invented page-creation-by-naming and backlinking
          • the former I can believe, don't think he invented the backlink.
        • FedWiki – Welcome Visitors
          • Looking at this hoping I could link AMMDI to it, but I don't think that's their model.
            • Gives me an idea for a real "federation" of gardens...
          • Navigation is interesting (new pages pop up in columns)
          • FedWiki pages have an identity but not a home (unlike http). Good idea but belongs on a different level than FedWiki....
        • "robot critic" ? unit tests, annotated? ??? not very clear what this is. Descriptions of intention? "Reads what you write and comments whether what you say happens". They are annotations and there is conversation around these annotations.
      • Daniel Doyen, Readwise
        • Annotations for electronic readers
        • extracts highlight data from various services and makes it accessible.
        • will send you email or show you a website...
        • "A very very tiny Zapier of reading data" (which should mean more to me than it does)
        • PC revolutionized writing but not reading, they are working in it
      • Bastien Guerry, org-mode
        • Written note is like a pharmakon
        • notes fight forgetfullness
        • good note taking tools blend into online conversation
        • anti-model: Word docs
        • Model 1: Mediawiki
        • Model 2: Email driven git workflow (?)
        • Model 3: Blogs + RSS
        • for all notes are part of conversations Goddinpotty not even a little conversational, sigh.
      • Oliver Sauter, Worldbrain, Memex
        • In the Flow, A case for Bespoke Interoperability
        • Memex open-source tool
        • integrates with Readwise...
        • not very interesting talk, but maybe its a useful tool (esp for interopo)
        • Basically web bookmarker/annotater that can export to Roam?
      • Dan Whaley, Hypothes.is
        • Differnt apps for different things.
        • Too many one-way imports, not enough integrations
        • Neat but is org-mode really so more high-level than Roam?
      • Conor White-Sullivan (Roam)
        • Roam is not about note-taking
        • Interesting background! He tried to get collective knowledge capture in gov working
        • Boostrapped through EA community, big surprise
        • They are a few dozen distributed people
        • Mentions "the curse of Xanadu", and complexity budgets...
      • Eduardo Flancia? http://anagora.org (Google engineer)
        • Agora: crowdsourced distributed knowledge graph
        • invites people to contribute their digital garden....
          • TODO maybe?
          • Looks like they expect Markdown in a Git repo. Modifying static-roam to generate Markdown would be actually not that hard, since it has the Roam Markdown...hm. Might need to do something special for links?
      • Junyu Zhan (Logseq, the most promising of the Roam clones I've checked out)
        • Privacy first
        • Open source
        • Newish plugin architecture
      • Discussion
        • What's the 25 year plan?
        • Conor: can't get notified if a five-year-old article gets retracted
          • mentions Nelson / codex standoff annotation
          • also apologizes for central server
          • Mentions the curse of Xanadu, his philosophy is to solve problems in the order they come up...open source not necessarily the best path.
          • "the problem is so unexplored about how we present knowledge to oursleve". Glad there are OS clones of Roam. Lots of open problems.
          • Sample problem: user-filtering backlinks
    • Random notes
      • This conference, unsurprisingly, is everybody showing off their little startup projects. These young people need to be building standards.
      • That is – they use and evolve format standards like Markdown or JSON, but nobody is working on standards for interoperability of hypertexts, so they can easily link to each other. That's exactly the kind of thing that their more ambitious visions call for, but it doesn't seem to be the kind of thing the startup culture encourages.