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Thread about Roamblogs, prompted by (thanks to for encouraging me to write it)
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How would you reimagine blogs around graph databases as the foundation? (Roam, Notion, Gatsby all seem to have blog like functionality in their sights but it feels like a stepchild use case relative to their core use cases of notes, wikis, collaboration, static pages) twitter.com/vgr/status/120…
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(EDIT to thread: Apparently twitter refused to let me publish this storm because I've used the phrase "everything is deeply intertwingled" too many times already. Had to edit the phrasing slightly to stop a vague "Whoops, you already said that" error message)
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Anyway, with Roam, I can just mention a new idea using a [[page link]], & get a placeholder page for it. Even before adding content to the page, it already displays every place where that word/phrase is used, giving context for learning more about it:
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Knowledge systems which display contextual backlinks to a node open up an interesting new behavior. You can bootstrap a new node extensionally (rather than intensionally) by simply linking to it from many other nodes—even before it has any content.
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I've only done a little bit of this but it's been amazing and I can tell that it's going to make a huge difference to my online writing. I've wanted something like this for years. Here's some thinking from 2 years ago. Ended up making an Airtable and it helped... like 5%.
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In those notes, you'll notice I talk about Tables of Contents and about meaningness.com, which is one of the best examples of a hypertext *book* that I'm aware of. made drupal plugins for 🛠️ WIP pages & hover-glossary
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Replying to @vgr and @Meaningness
👆 I also think this. I have some thoughts here in my public roam about roamblogs & roambooks and meaningness is my main go-to example for the latter. Read here: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo (This is a feature wishlist, not thoughts on what is or could be profoundly possible.)
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I see the essential difference between blog & book as: a book has a finite breadth & depth, that's somewhat known from the beginning, and thus is organized around a ToC, and can be *finished". Also intended to be internally coherent.
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By contrast, a blog is an ongoing exploration of whatever captures the writer's interest at a given moment (perhaps with a theme). Any table of contents must be mostly retrospective, since the writer doesn't know what comes next. Later posts may contradict earlier ones.
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