What software do you think in? Finding the "question mark node"

More in the theme of "repetition is the very soul of the net", a question from Peter Merholz back in 2002 on peterme: What software do you think in?

Now that I have OS X sitting in front of me instead of Windows 98, my tools for thinking have changed. The OS X tool that seems to absorb my writing for a public audience most easily is Ecto of all things, since it has a handy "postponed postings" feature that makes it easy to noodle something through before I post it, and a handy category drawer on the side that reminds me about what I might be thinking about at the moment.

I'm still a huge fan of wiki (hm, need to be) for a certain class of thinking - the space of the "question mark node" that Chris Locke once wrote about for Vacuum where you really don't yet know what the answer is but you can write around the answer to have a bunch of really good questions, with the answers to be filled in by the team later. Socialtext is hands down the best environment I've seen for that (nondisclaimer: I'm a founder) for coming up with answers and remembering them in a group. It leads to very, very different writing than what shows up here, though it takes postponed to an extreme in that everything is in an unfinished state forever.

Saving this to write and edit more later...

Ah, found the question mark node paragraph from Chris:

anyway, yes, this is a subject in which I have a lot of interest. I even
have some (quite old now, but I think still valid) thoughts on knowledge
acquisition (learning) and semantic networks. most important is the
"question mark node" -- something you don't understand yet, but has the
potential to "complete the circuit" on an emergent idea -- or constellation
of ideas. American education teaches kids they must not allow these
question marks. horribly binary: you either "know it" or you deny "it"
exists. this is why we have a population of near-idiots. (Vacuum 4q)

More to the what do you think in question - I also think in Google, del.icio.us, Flickr, my private wiki, and my inbox(es) and mail archives from over time. Certain phrases and ideas and images stick in memory and then somehow I root around to find them again.

Comments

[Arthur Vanderbilt]

I think in:

Text, including code (constantly) (http://www.macromates.com, http://www.crimsoneditor.com/, http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)
Tinderbox (often) (http://www.eastgate.com/tinderbox/)
Instiki (often, public) (http://www.instiki.org)
Blosxom (increasingly, public) (http://www.blosxom.com)
Inspiration (decreasingly) (http://www.inspiration.com)

[RageBoy]

I guess I partly think in Technorati, ego-surfing which (for hits on Chief Blogging Officer) is how I found this reminder from you, Ed, of something I said so long ago it had nearly faded into to the dim mists of time. I thought my analyst (no kidding) was the only other living person who knew the semantics of "question mark node," so how wonderful to find it here. I've been running OS X on a Mac G4 Powerbook since I jettisoned Intel/Microsoft about six months ago. If you want to see a killer app for this platform, check out NoteTaker (http://www.aquaminds.com). I guar-on-tee, you'll be blown away.

[Arthur Vanderbilt]

I'm about six months ahead of you, Chris.

I've got NoteTaker, but I don't end up using it much. I like it, I just have no use for it.

Wait till you get to your Tinderbox stage.

Oh, I left one out: Curio (http://www.zengobi.com)
It's billed as a thing for "creative" professionals, but when I get to researching something, hoo boy .. I can just throw anything I find at it, move it around as if it were a magnetic stretchy thing, annotate to my heart's content, and then draw on it with my tablet. It's a pretty amazing thing.

[anarchivist]

I found this post through your del.icio.us bookmarks, which I've subscribed to for a while now. I have been starting to use Drupal to do this since the creation of meaningful link aliases is easy but not as trivial as it is to do with a wiki. I haven't gotten as far as using Curio or other apps of its ilk, but while finishing up at SI in 2004 I used VoodooPad - http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/ - a lot in the process of writing papers. It's basically a wikified desktop app; it can export the data to an online wiki in the full version (there's a lite version, which is the one I had used).