Filed under: hypertext
An introduction.
This blog is only a holdover until I can move on to bigger and better things. I am currently in the process of learning how to use tinderbox to create fully customized blog. I am also in the process of attempting to teach myself some web programming skills.
Tinderbox, for those of you who do not know, is arguably one of the best things that has ever happened to a computer.
Essentially, it connects notes the same way the internetz do. You create notes, which act as individual web pages. Now you can link them to one another. Have an idea about a film related to a book you’ve read? Create a note for the book and one for the movie, link them together, allowing you to navigate through either one to the other. This means one day while looking through ideas you had while reading that book, it can remind you of the idea you had for the film. As your ideas become more complex, as you have more of them, the tighter the thought weave becomes and the more useful the thought web. The software works as much through the writing of notes as it does through the linking of ideas. Relational note-taking. A hypertextual mind-map.
What makes the software really crack is the visual representations of both the notes themselves and the links. My personal favorite view is the map view, as shown above. With the software, instead of outlining your ideas and then sorting them into the outline as you progress, you can create as many notes as you need to and then divide them into piles as if they were pieces of paper. Hypertextual pieces of paper. This way, the outline rises out of the natural folds and nuances of the ideas. Bottom up thinking with a fully hypertextual interface.
Congratulations, you can now become the internet, your notebook is reborn in the 21st century.
This is essentially the sort of thing my blog will be about. Hypertext. Cyborgs. Books. The odd music post. Arts. Architecture. New Media. Pluralizing things with the letter z.
