Last entry here for now -- will officially be moving this skunkworks over to its new home in Pelican on Live Mind! It's been fun spitballing here until now. I'll be continuing to use GitHub for various other projects, both writing and coding. See you on the Flip Side!
I sat down at the desk this morning and got an unexpectedly juicy surprise: Obsidian 1.0 is officially out! And it's got lots of juicy improvements in store.
If you're a fan of Andy Matuschak and the way loading notes in his site effortlessly slides them accordion-style across the page (which you could formerly access via the Sliding Panes community plugin), you'll love the new Tab Stacks feature built right in to the UI.
One pro tip if you use the Checklist plugin on a Mac and were used to creating or toggling checkboxes with the hotkey "Command + Enter," that keyboard shortcut has been remapped to "Command + L" -- but you can always remap it in the Obsidian Settings if you wish.
Happy Second Brain-ing!
There is no "universal solution" to anything -- just tradeoffs and processes.
There is no Shared Reality -- increasingly so.
Reality is fragmenting and sharding. There are different pockets and instances. The more information we create, the more disinformation we create -- and disinfo scales much faster than info. This is an existential problem. There is no universal solution.
The new slate of offerings from Ben Smith's (of BuzzFeed fame) new media startup Semafor is out -- starting with a series of newsletters in tech, media, business, climate, Africa, and more. The goal of Semafor is to compete as a new global-focused entity with storied enterprises like Reuters and The Associated Press -- no small task.
The newsletter-first rollout is a sign of the times, wherein all of a sudden email is hot again and is now being (re)envisioned as the foremost channel for subscribing to a particular topic or individual domain expert's point of view on a topic. What that says to me is that news product development has utterly failed to solve a very basic problem of signal:noise ratio, in providing audiences with simple ways to follow specific threads from end to end or on an open-ended basis. The pseudo-death of RSS played a role in that, as did the advent of Google and Facebook's demands for ever-increasing scale in order to simply tread water on the revenue side as a digital publisher. You can't achieve massive scale by amplifying a proliferating stack of niche topics -- though not for lack of trying: we had a good run of it while it lasted at Weblogs, Inc.
Having been down in the trenches of new media for the better part of two decades, I'm in no way shocked by the lack of technological vision on display. So many promising new experiments were gobbled up by aging corporate behemoths or print conglomerates that could barely figure out how to keep the lights on, or prevent websites from crashing down under the load of burst traffic during Apple keynotes or other tentpole events. They were figuring out "this whole technology thing" as they were flying the planes, most of which felt as if they had been built during World War II. They never really figured it out -- and they still haven't.
Nevertheless, I'm excited to see what Ben and co. have in store -- because the upside of Going Back to the prehistorical yesteryear of the Inbox is its relative simplicity. There is an appeal to the Marie Kondo-ing of technological wizardry that tries to pass for information innovation, and a return to a Back to Basics approach of good storytelling, ethical journalism, and Just The Text, Ma'am. Bring it on!
It's easy to get overwhelmed. It's easy to get distracted from our Purpose -- there are so many shiny objects. Take heart! We all struggle with it. You are not alone.
I've become deeply obsessed with Obsidian, the most dreamy note-taking meets knowledge base forever storage app I've ever had the pleasure to encounter (and as a longtime compulsive note-taker and Evernote information hoarder/digital packrat, I do not say that lightly!). As a companion to this I've fallen in love with the entire Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Second Brain movements, which feel like a breath of fresh air in this brave new world of being constantly pelted and overwhelmed by the onslaught of information and disinformation.
It feels like a universe where tools and philosophies around code and content are converging -- down to the fact that my Obsidian UI and my Atom UI appear remarkably the same. Both applications offer almost endless customization functionality and extensive libraries of packages and plugins (here's a GitHub List of my favorite Obsidian plugins so far). For people who crave the ability to get under the hood and truly, fully own their data and their workflow experience, it's just a tall glass of water.
This PKM ecosystem is reminding me of the early days of the web, for those of us who were drawn in by the idea of democratizing information and making technological creativity accessible to as many people as possible. Much like it feels elsewhere in culture and politics, it turns out not everyone agrees with this mission and fundamental philosophy of openness. I didn't really expect that outcome -- perhaps I was naïve. That makes this "new to me" (re)discovery of communities of praxis around self-determination in the digital sphere a powerful return to Original Face.
Here's to the digital dreamers!
[CAVEAT: There's also a danger in getting too attached to the PKM ideology itself. There's a Goldilocks Zone that some self-described note-taking gurus may have wandered out of...]Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day to those who celebrate!
Looks like I'm not the only one Going Back to Basics -- GTD guru Merlin Mann has an experiment on collected wisdom here on GitHub, and Dave Winer is using GitHub for various projects relating to his blog Scripting News including a backup process he calls "two-factor archiving."
There are also numerous projects relating to blogging on GitHub out there, from the default Jekyll/GitHub Pages integration to using SSGs with GitHub Actions, as well as more custom and DIY methods of rendering Markdown or plain text into a lightweight blog engine. I'm enjoying exploring this ecosystem at the moment, as an effort in reclaiming blogging's roots in owning your output in a "full stack" manner versus being locked in by one or more platforms without a lot of (or any) data portability. It feels like an important counterculture movement at the moment -- and I plan to "just keep swimming" in it!
So much change rippling through my network -- so many career changers, so many looking for something more fulfilling, so many people clawing our way back to a sense of purpose, deep meaning, and core values. We want to get back to basics, back to our foundations, and to figure out so somehow go "back" with forward momentum. Because the only way out is through.
For me, part of that journey is about getting back to blogging. That's my Original Face -- my origin story. Blogging is the kind of Learning Out Loud that lit me up, drew me in, and ignited a fire that still burns. We wanted to create a brave new world of information -- but despite our best intentions, it seems to have turned into a world of disinformation.
As yak shaving tends to go, I'm hobbling along with a DIY situation here until I can finish up a research loop into Static Site Generators vs. Headless CMS options. I already have a WordPress blog and I'm looking for something both more lightweight and closer to the command line so I can do some reskilling and upskilling in the technical acumen front at the same time. If you have any feelings or suggestions, hit me up on Twitter!