On Friday I stumbled upon
Jess Martin's summary of the Render Conference, a confab of 75 technologists working on tools for thought or adjacent experiments. The summary includes several embedded videos from presentations given at the conference, though unfortunately the audio quality is not the best. Jerry Michalski is one of the co-hosts who has been using The Brain for 25 years and makes a version available at
JerrysBrain.com. The Brain is a mind mapping tool that pre-exists all of the modern "tools for thought" applications, and at one time I owned a copy that I used but I did not keep up paying for the version upgrades. For some reason I prefer the upon/down hierarchy of outlines rather than the radient, multi-direction 0f mind maps. One thing that recall liking about The Brain is that you can use it to link to files on your computer, so it works well to link to other documents on your computer.
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Readwise, which I use to store highlights from Pocket and Kindle books in Roam and Evernote, was in attendance and gave demonstration of the reading application they are developing. I am keeping an eye on this because it has the potential of being more useful to me than Pocket if it enables me to high and annotate web articles.
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Martin notes in his summary of the conference that interoperability was a big theme. Included in the conference was a explanation of a protocol called
Noosphere that appears intended to allow different tools for thought products to share information with each other. A point made during the presentation of Noosphere is that the Internet itself is a tool for thought. I watch some of the video on Noosphere but it was over my head, but if the gist is providing an API for exchanging information then I think the developer is on the right track. Earlier in the year Dave Winer was pushing OPML as the "protocol" that could be that glue between tools of thought, but OPML is file format and the current iterations of these tools aren't really working with files, but rather non-structured databases. Moving files around is tedious in comparison to exchanging data via APIs.
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I think there is more to mine out of the videos from the conference that I need more time to digest. Linus Lee was in attendance and he participated in a session about AI and ML in building tools for thought, which I think gets us closer to what the ultimate goal of making this software easier to use for personal augmentation.
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