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I don't think he's talking about a personal knowledgebase, I think he's talking about something else we are very familiar with. Think about it, he says a PK is
by mapgrep 11y ago
I don't think he's talking about a personal knowledgebase, I think he's talking about something else we are very familiar with. Think about it, he says a PK is "any system that you use to store and retrieve general information Unlimited size... just about everything you want to save for your whole life."
That's a computer, full stop. Or, in software terms, an operating system. In storage terms, a filesystem. These high level tools are designed precisely for the tasks he outlined: Handle data of ever increasing size reliably; make it easy to navigate and search; be simple to use, convenient and fast, and structured.
Where operating systems and filesystems fall down is in searching heterogenous data in a powerful way, and that's where people turn to PKs. Evernote is/was good at searching text and even pictures of text and for tagging; "the Brain" is apparently good at cataloging structured to-do and project type data; Kumu seems to do social graphs; inforapid seems to specialize in process descriptions.
There is no reason operating systems can't get better at processing this data natively. Apple has slouched in that direction in fits and starts with projects like Spotlight and Quick Look. Microsoft once fantasized about building a filesystem from a relational database and has developed an interesting system of "search contracts" for Windows.
- zzzmarcus 11y agoOP here. I mostly agree with you. If the filesystem was better at a few things then it'd be the ideal PK. Right now though it isn't enough. It's too slow or too inconvenient for most things you'd want in a PK. Creating files isn't fast or easy. Usually you need to open some other app to do it, even if it's just a terminal. Linking one file to another and showing the connection with metadata like the direction of the link is possible, but not easy, especially if you want multiple links to and from a file. You can sync with things like Dropbox, but search is painfully slow and viewing/editing files means opening a different app. It's just cumbersome. The reason I like TheBrain is actually because it's good for much more than todos and project data. I have one "file" that has over 10 thousand notes in it. It's organized arbitrarily by my preference, but definitely structured, searchable and "infinitely" expandable. The best part though is that it's really easy to visualize related data in TheBrain. In fact, as I've read comments today, I've come to realize that that is the one crucial thing most PK's are missing. There aren't good visualizations for Evernote, OneNote, most filesystems, org mode, etc. I"m with you, there's no reason the filesystem can't become the best PK, but it's far from that now.