Outlining

Leo 4.1

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 02:54:56 GMT

Release 4.1 of Leo is now available.

Chronology Taxonomy

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 01:36:00 GMT

Jarrett House North reported a bit about Dave Winer's recent visit to Microsoft.

One thing that particularly caught my attention was something Dave was reported to have said in response to a question: "I think there are three ways of managing and finding information--chronology, which is blogs, search, and taxonomy..."

I agree essentially, though I'd like to generalize that just a bit more, and propose that there are two ways of finding information:

By Search - browsing matches to some specified criteria

By Structural Navigation - navigating through some pre-defined structural organization

with taxonomy being one mechanism for structural navigation, and chronology being a particular kind of taxonomy.

Blogs indeed are primarily chronological in nature; that is their 'natural' taxonomy, if you will. Chronology as a particular taxonomy looks like this (at least in the context of blogs):

YYYY / MM / DD / PermalinkGUID

Most blogging engines also allow additional taxonomies to be applied as a means of helping consumers find information. These are often called 'categories'; unfortunately, most engines I've seen have limited these personal taxonomies to very simple one- or at most two-level structures.

Now that I have a solid blogging platform in place that allows for some experimentation, I hope to explore further over the coming months this intersection of taxonomies, outlines, and blogs.

ActiveRenderer

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 02:20:48 GMT

Marc Barrot has just released 2.0 of his ActiveRenderer web outlining product. Check it out, especially the newly exposed API.

Emerging New Outliner

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 01:44:32 GMT

Jeremy Bowers is blogging his development notes as he designs and builds Iron Lute, a new Python+Tk outliner.

Introduced here, his recents posts go deep on the design of his outline data structures, exploring in great detail a discussion to the question 'What is an Outline?'

Seems he's aware of Leo (my outliner of choice) but wants an outliner that allows the use of the outline structure for all content (as opposed to having a body for free text associated with each tree node, as Leo does).

I'm pretty committed to Leo and it's author's vision for Leo going forward, but Iron Lute is worth keeping an eye on.

About This Particular Outliner

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 02:37:52 GMT

Ted Goranson has posted the latest entry in his excellent series on outliner products (Mac-centric).

If you have any interest in outlining as a form of information organization, the whole series is definitely worth the read (regardless of whether you use a Mac or not).