I have a big problem writing about things, because most time i am distracted by myself. The worldwideweb is amazing in sucking me into it while thinking about serious topics. I still have no great solution to collect all my ideas, as a collection i can write later on again. The latest tries i made were a Wiki, which just didn´t fit well with my thinking, i am more a leveled thinker. So i tried outliner i.e. Dave Winers OPML Outliner. Actually it is a great thing to level ideas, subgroup them and find more and more subideas or specifications. But from time to time i am coming to the point, that i want to 2 or more levels. The first level would be short ideas i want to publish directly from my writing software to a blog (untill now i didn´t get Dave`s software as a bloging software running, i am not a coder, not a techmate, but i want to write) The next level are ideas i want to use later, maybe as a subidea or specification. As long as i am thinking about, i dont want to to have them public, but i want to have them in the same document and i want to have them related with other ideas. The solution WorkFlowy found for related outlines is nice, but WF is not cheap and just for a try i dont want to give money (did it too much in the past and as a student there is not too much money.)
What i am although missing – didnt find a solution yet – is to deal with bigger related informations. I.e. i am writing a historical cityguide about the workingclass organizations in Berlin, i have a huge amount of names, streets, dates, happenings. As a basement i use historical files (newspapers, police reports, …) What i need is a relation between the original files to the names, which are connected with the adresses and so on. And i want to create relation between the texts like i do with blogs. I tried to set up a wordpress and a wiki-installation, typed down more than 400 short articles, but the result wasnt what i expected. A user case i want to give, what i am looking for:
I have an article about a strike 1932 in the north of berlin. in the article i want to set the name of the organization as a tag, the date where it happens, the time in which it happens (between x and y), the character of the strike (rentstrike, solidaritystrike). If i spotted the adress of the organization earlier, i want that it connects the organization with the adress and the adress where the strike happens i want to be recognized too (may i want to map this later). Because in history names of streets change i want something like: Adress then-> adress now and when i map the adresses i see it on a map. If i have pictures, i want them referred in the same way, like “this person is named in these articles too, this is her adress, her organizationmembership, birth-dates, etc.)
Sounds like a cloud to me, sounds much more like not existing yet. May someone can help me with my problems.
I wrote this short article, because Dave Winer wrote about “How to help the open web” and may my needs are something which helps to think about.