The state of personal knowledge management

PKM tools assist with the use and organization of personally-relevant knowledge in digital form, including user interface affordances such as outlining, links, embedding, and search. CKM is the idea that such tools are also useful for managing knowledge relevant to multiple people. Although the term hasn’t been used widely until recently, many exam... See more

Knowledge tooling is happily becoming a hot topic again. With this trend is coming revived interest in Xanadu, bi-directional hyperlinking, knowledge databases, visualizing knowledge graphs, and so on. At this moment, I see most of the emphasis being put on tooling for the research side, with Notion, Workflowy, and the new and hyped Roam Research l... See more

The past few years have seen the rise of many knowledge management tools, online communities, and curation businesses. But what’s interesting is how these categories are remixing into new combinations of content, community, and software.

In fact, the end vision is to go way beyond your personal knowledge management system to build the best tool to generate collective intelligence.

The way professionals, entrepreneurs, and companies utilize knowledge will dramatically change. Every professional will feel a sense of agency that they can capture the highest-value information they encounter, and distill it into actionable, bite-sized nuggets to enrich their future thinking. Entrepreneurs and creators will save tremendous amounts... See more

In both, many people value the output (product) more highly than the process of getting to the output. That’s a mistake. Often, the process has as much (and in the case of PKM, more) value than the final product. Let’s examine how this applies to each discipline.

The point of personal knowledge management isn’t capturing and managing information; it... See more

Most "note-taking" or "knowledge management" software acts as a passive storage container. You create notes, shuffle them around into folders, add a few tags, and then they sit there. Waiting. Until you consciously remember to go looking for them.