The purpose of these cards
See also Why "cards"?
I get ideas all the time and I often capture them in my notebooks (see My Notebook System article). What should I do with them after I’ve captured them?
I also learn or figure out solutions to lots of problems on a frequent basis. (Mostly computer stuff.) They’re little things that I don’t need to turn into full-blown articles. Sadly, most of these just get lost and I end up having to re-learn them or re-figure them out.
I don’t have anything really great for storing and sharing these little bits of info until now. I’m excited that I’ll have a place to put tiny notes.
(At the Unix command line, the "um" system system has worked really well for quick retrieval. But that’s a very specialized resource.)
I’m sure some card tooling will be required to make them truly frictionless to create and easy to search.
I’ve also heard that these small, connected notes promote idea generation and creative thinking. It seems like a reasonable claim.
Metaphor
I just ran into The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream (bonkerfield.org) with an awesome metaphor for how stream-like flows of media (blogs/feeds/timelines - or, in my case, email and my log notes) can be semi-organized and digested over time:
So… what if I could metaphorically divert my raging (downhill) torrent of online conversation into a shallower meandering Swale? […] to build a place where the content pools together.
I really like that metaphor and it sounds similar to what I’m doing here.
Actually, in my mind’s eye, what I picture is not so much a natural landscape, but scenes from the Star Wars films in which fleets of ships flying together through the swirling chaos of hyperspace appear to pop into place over a wide patch of space. The ships are still moving, but are at a near stand-still compared to lightspeed.
In the same way, I feel like putting a new card here here plucks the thought from the streaming chaos of The Big Firehose of my thoughts and sets it in a thick soup (or maybe transparent gelatin) where it can move around, slowly mingling with other ideas.
The liquid or semi-liquid is important here - I’m not embedding these ideas in amber to preserve them for all time.