Wednesday September 1, 2021; 2:47 PM EDT
- I had the pleasure of talking with Andy Sylvester yesterday about tools for thought for Episode 3 of his new podcast, Thinking about Tools for Thought. Below, I'll drop in some notes of the main things I had on my mind as we talked. (The recording session took place before I was able to think through the ideas for my tagging post below, so that feature currently developing in Dave Winer's Drummer work is not mentioned.)#
- Brief notes on my portion of the episode#
- My goal is paying attention to the specificity of somebody else’s language#
- Looking for ways to slow down, practices and tools that help me return to the specific language of others#
- Google Docs for certain kinds of collaboration#
- Microsoft Word for documents that will live primarily on paper#
- Dave Winer outliner projects: Fargo, Little Outliner, Little Outliner 2 for ease of reorganizing, re-contextualizing and reconsidering, at speed#
- Now in beta: Dave Winer’s Drummer, with outlining more tightly woven into web publishing, with new aspects of the software still emerging#
- Ease of juxtaposing bits of language: illustrate and test one against the other, trying to know more as a result#
- Bookmarks feature of Drummer for saving posts out of the chronological stream and quickly placing them in the context of related ideas#
- [Post-recording session insight from the week’s blogging: tagging not into a read-only page but into a read-and-write page ups the ante quite a bit for tracking thoughts over time, building something more extended]#
- Not just recovering an old post but having tools and building social spaces together that might help us refine our thinking and make us into a coherent group that might do something in the world#
- Vicki Hearne helps me understand communication as the building of a social and civic space#
- The power of a live outline available to collaborators#
- Different degrees of contact with other people’s language—just gets better and better as a shared and sharable space#