Roam Research for thinking and knowledge management

Okay, thanks for letting me know, that’s good to hear! I was a little bit afraid it would be an onboarding à la Superhuman.

And they’ve got a limited time, lock-in, 50% off early-bird pricing deal right now. Don’t know if they’re still doing this, but when they made this same offer a couple of years back with Dynalist they said you could drop the service after buying into early-bird, then come back at a later date and still get the lock-in pricing.

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Thanks!
Okay, you got me all very interested in this solution now :grin: will test it tonight I think and report back in a separate thread. (But be afraid. I’m very opinionated with my notes apps :grin:)

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It bothers me that the obsidian logo thing is purple.
image

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I think I bought some iBeacons years ago that looked identical to this

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If you’re interested, my opinions on Obsidian are here.

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That thing (“logo”?) reminds me of a game piece of some sort – but I cannot place it.

It’s a boulder on the landscape in that old Tank Commander game…

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Speaking of logos, I was wondering about the Roam logo and saw a reddit post that suggests its an astrolabe.

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Asteroids.

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I lost a lot of hours and many quarters to that game back in the day!

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It is, in which to roam your brain.

@beck I really liked your interesting videos on Tinderbox.
I am a doctor based in india and I am trying to build my own workflow and need to create a Zettelkasten slip box.
Could you please share your thoughts on how does Roam compare with tinderbox as I found Tinderbox having a steep learning curve, whereas roam offering a simple yet tightly linked atmosphere to create your own external brain
thanking you
warm regards

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Hoo-boy, that’s a big question, there @tarunds. And I don’t have enough experience in Roam to answer it with any confidence. To me, they are very different tools and both are worth paying attention to.

Tinderbox is an exemplar, in my opinion. The software has integrity, and the developer understands hypertext in ways only a small percentage of people on the planet do. He’s been a member of the scholarly community advancing the edges of what’s possible for decades. As a user, you benefit from the time he’s spent intellectually and practically working with those ideas. He also seems to build the software to support thinking and so the interface and content structure does not limit your creativity, learning, and memory. (This comes at the cost of feeling a bit daunting, I agree.)

With Roam, it is easier to get started. And the developer has admiral goals in terms of societal power structures and knowledge sharing. I am inspired by his vision of being able to read something and go backwards (where did this idea evolve from) and forwards (how did it change over time?). But the tool is actively evolving, has some stability issues as I understand it, and I’m not sure where he stands on supporting personal growth, creativity, learning compared to his thoughts on the collective benefits of his work.

All that said, I think everyone should use the tools that benefit them and their style of thinking, learning, creating. Feel invited to reach out off-thread if you want to discuss the particular difficulties you’re having getting started with TB.

Beck

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Or, possibly, knowledge?

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The youtube free RoamResearch course by Anonym.s has now been released

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS2Dh3N7QpuZP6LLhUMkMqQ/videos

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There’s also a nice tour of someone using it as a Zettelkasten here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6PIrVZoZAk&feature=youtu.be

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I’ve watched this one once so far, and I found it difficult to follow exactly how he was implementing it. It will need a couple of re-watches I think for me to to grasp.

With the backlinks being automatic, I think the real power use appears to be around the strategic use, and positioning, of links/tags/attributes to ensure that referenced (and unreferenced) links reveal the right information and then the use of filters to bubble up the golden nuggets of information. Not to mention ‘queries’.

His tagging strategy was very interesting.

I’ve just discovered the embedded blocks that update both ways. Very clever.

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These are great, they are well paced and short. I’m only part way through, but from what I’ve seen so far these are highly recommended.

Joel’s process is hard to follow in an interview format like that, but I found his Roam-interpretation of zettels to be inspiring. Hopefully he’ll create more videos. I may reach out to him and ask him to!

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