With everything going on with Twitter and Reddit I feel like I have a new appreciation for having my own local knowledge base on Logseq.
Demo page: https://demo.logseq.com
With everything going on with Twitter and Reddit I feel like I have a new appreciation for having my own local knowledge base on Logseq.
Demo page: https://demo.logseq.com
For those just glancing through: what would you define “knowledge management” as?
The the Wikipedia article on personal knowledge management is a little dense, but basically it’s a way to keep track of everything you learn or consume and link them together to develop new ideas or insights. Sometimes people will call it a second or digital brain. There’s a lot of different ways to do it, and recently there’s been a lot of software like Logseq, Obsidian, and Notion, that facilitates linking everything together and keeping it organized using [[hyperlinks]] and #tags among other things.
so to really dumb it down, is it basically like a digital version of a paper notebook, except that it can do more stuff?
The simplest forms are. Except hyperlinks are super powerful and unlike paper you can restructure and recomnect as you see fit. Since it is computer software, you can also get other benefits like a working to do-list next to your medicine list or machine learning indexing and cross-referencing your documents. Take a look at the Devonthink website for an idea of how idea management on steroids look. On the other end of the spectrum you have things like Obsidian where everything is simply stored in pure markdown text and synced by you how you see fit. There’s a solution for every temper these days.
Ehhh. Kinda? The feature that differentiates it from a normal notebook is the ability to link pages. You’re basically constantly searching for connections while building your own personal Wiki.
knowledge management refers to how to organize, store, retrieve, and use information.
In the context of personal knowledge management using tools like Logseq, the definition could be something like this:
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the practice of capturing, organizing, and making sense of one’s own observations, ideas, and experiences to understand and share knowledge. It’s about creating a system that allows you to capture thoughts and ideas easily, make connections between different pieces of information, and retrieve and use this knowledge effectively.
For example, if you’re learning a new topic, you might read a variety of sources and take notes in Logseq. Over time, you’d review and refine these notes, connecting new insights to existing ones, creating a rich, interconnected knowledge base.
So is it like a cross between journaling and citation management software? I’m trying to figure out what proponents are getting out of this above what I get from just bookmarking interesting sites.
If it helps you to visualize, one somewhat common/popular form of personal knowledgment management is a wiki. Like Wikipedia, except it’s personal (or for a small team). You can keep track of references and also make notes about things, but it’s also about connecting ideas together. Just like on Wikipedia, you can have a page about, let’s say LLMs, which includes all the software and approaches you’ve tried, results, sample snippets, references to repos, but as you’re writing about what you’ve tried and what worked, you might also have links to other wiki pages, like programming languages, build tools, test tools, etc. As you document more and build more knowledge, your articles all get meshed together in one well-organized network. Ideally it should be easy to navigate if you come back to a technology later and need to get back up to speed.
Tiago Forte’s book Building a Second Brain has some good arguments for using a personal knowledge management system.
Some day those sites won’t be there any more - and the Wayback Machine doesn’t store everything. Plus what if you just want to save a great quote from something you read?