Over the last 3 years, I’ve stored many small snippets of information in a set of Google Notebooks. Sample topics: notes for blog posts, programming skills that I’d like to learn and preliminary (or half-baked) ideas for research or software projects. I’ve learned that:
- Whilst Google Notebook is great for scraping information from web pages, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of editing and presentation
- Ideas left in private notebooks quickly become dead ideas
Yes you can publicise, tag and collaborate at a Google Notebook, but this doesn’t fit with my workflow – or that of many others, I suspect. So, I’ve taken as much of the material as I want to make public and dumped it on a wiki at Wikidot.com. By the way, if you’re looking for a free hosted wiki with plenty of features, you could do a lot worse.
If anything there interests you enough to add material, let me know and I’ll invite you as an editor (you’ll need to create a wikidot account if you don’t have one).
Precisely the reason why http://deepaksingh.net exists. IMO, if your wiki has some ACLs then there is no reason not to go that route.
Wikidot looks nice too.
Nice! Given that both you and Deepak have ended in this state, it is likely to represent a sort of energetic minimum ;)
Besides obvious benefits, do you think this wiki-mode of expressing your thoughts could benefit from external “interactivity” in a form of comments? Sort of like in here..
It seems kind of irritating that you end up needing to use both blogs and wikis to do everything you want rather than just one content management system that does both for you. Hopefully someone is working on this because it seems to be quite a common problem in managing ideas and thoughts and records.
Agreed Cameron. I think to some extent this is a problem with using free hosted services. Hosting your own site allows for much more flexibility wrt a CMS. I prefer the convenience of hosted, but that may change one day.
If you use Google Notebook it may help to read this announcement:
http://tinyurl.com/7nqpcb
Summary: Axe to notebook :(
My understanding is that the Google Notebook service remains available; they’ve just stopped development and new user sign-up.