Ken Smith read my post commenting on his “Why write?” post, and focused on a link talking about adding value to information. Ken tweeted about it, and I would like to explore this more.

I follow multiple RSS feeds using River5 and specialized lists by category (my main list has 155 feeds). I view these feeds through a standalone river-of-news app that displays the feeds and has its own URL. The newest items are at the top of the page. River5 truncates the items to be less than 500 characters (I think). When I see an article I want to read fully, I right-click on the link to open a new browser tab. I usually scroll through the news app page until I get to the last place I read to, then start reading the tabs I have opened.

My process has mostly been to be a “collector” (see this excellent article on the “Collector’s Fallacy”, I have this disease), with multiple link dump documents (mostly not organized, one or two documents organized on a single topic.). I spent a little time exploring how to organize these links, but have made little progress. From the link I mentioned at the start of this post, I am past “reading” and I am at the “collecting quotes” stage (if I change “quotes” to “links”, I think that is a better description what I am doing).

The next step up the value chain is “creating excerpts”, or a summary of a text (think “blog post” or “story”). Sometimes I add a sentence summarizing what a link is about, most of the time not. This would be a new area of refinement for me, and I am considering it. The zettle author Christian has a great post on how to process the reading from RSS feeds, and how to create a “knowledge cycle” (think “workflow”) to manage the moving of the information read from RSS feeds into a zettlekasten or other knowledge system. I am going to spend some time unpacking these posts this week and see if I can improve my information processing workflow.

One last note on the notes in a zettlekasten system. There has been much discussion about “atomic notes”, which represents the key ideas from a person’s research on some topic or source (sources one and two). These are not the kind of thing I am interested in creating/collecting, or at least not what I have been doing. A far more typical thing for me is something I did at work today. I was trying to figure out how to convert the output of a program into another format. I did some searching, installed a tool, found a script, played with the script in the tool, figured out how to use it, then wrote down a summary of my steps and added links to what I found in my search. Since I am not doing research for a book or for writing academic papers, the idea of an atomic note does not fit into my information world. However, capturing the steps of a discovery or how I worked out a problem. is very real and concrete to me. I used to know a fellow engineer who wrote “technical notes” to capture work he was doing (like a journal entry). Maybe that is how I should consider this type of knowledge creation. 

I am adding this to Frank McPherson’s collection on organizing information.