Building the Global Knowledge Graph: Dreaming the Dream for Roam Research

If you take a bong rip and close your eyes, you can imagine a world where Roam is a new sort of internet. Where people can publish ideas and reference each other’s ideas in deep, interlinked ways. It’d be like a giant public brain, instead of a private second brain.

That certainly would be a network effect.

The only problem is, I’ve seen a lot of “pu... See more

Users can remix and connect ideas in multiple overlapping hierarchies, with each unit of information becoming a node in a dynamic network. Any given node can occupy multiple positions simultaneously, convey information through defined relationships, and populate changes throughout the graph. With weightings assigned to the strength of relationships

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It would be like a search engine for ideas and concepts.  Perhaps something like public roam graphs will be the solution to this, but there are infinite ways to approach it.

Imagine a web browser powered by Roam. When you want to dig a specific topic, you will be able to access the personal knowledge management system of eminent people who spent months digging a certain topic. You will be able to access all their sources, to follow their thought processes, etc. In my opinion, Roam is not going after Notion or Evernote.... See more

These days, we get so much of our content in bite-sized, isolated bits — links in an email, tweets, Slack messages, blog posts. We consume information because it’s in front of us, rather than because it’s relevant for us. This continually present dynamic discourages reflection and thought. The future of content is about interfaces that can help us ... See more

On the surface, Roam looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and a note-taking tool like Evernote. It’s not. It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterl... See more