Indent with Intent: Fundamentals of Roam Research by [[R. J. Nestor]]

for - notetaking software - Obsidian - Roam Research - open source alternative to - Foam

notetaking software - Obsidian - Roam Research - open source alternative to - Foam - Microsoft owns Github and Foam is served from Github

to - Foam - https://hyp.is/Pf6tKnXBEe-rkdcD0hmZGA/foambubble.github.io/foam/

I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.

Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.

Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3

Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research<br /> by Harley Stanger

Part 1: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-1-the-capture-toolkit/ - Part 2: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-2-exporting-highlights-to-roam-research-with-readwise/ - Part 3: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-3-creating-literature-notes-in-roam-research/ - Part 4: Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research

synopsis of Ahrens

Hypothes.is + Wiki -> Global Knowledge Graph

I have thought long about the same issue and beyond. The triple (wiki, Hypothesis, donations) could be a working way to search for OER, form a social group processing them, and optionally support the creators.

I imagine that as follows: a person wants to learn about X. They can head to the wiki site about X and look into its Hypothesis annotations, where relevant OER with their preferred donation method can be linked. Also, study groups interested in the respective resource or topic can list virtual or live meetups there. The date of the meetups could be listed in a format that Hypothesis could search and display on a calendar.

Wiki is integral as it categorizes knowledge, is comprehensive, and strives to address biases. Hypothesis stitches websites together for the benefit of the site owners and the collective wisdom that emerges from the discussions. Donations support the creators so they can dedicate their time to creating high-quality resources.

Main inspirations:

Deschooling Society - Learning Webs

Building the Global Knowledge Graph

Schoolhouse calendar

If I understand it correctly, with hyperaudio, one can also create transcription to somebody else's video or audio when embedded.

In that case, if you add to hyperaudio the annotation capablity of hypothes.is or docdrop, the vision outlined in the article on Global Knowledge Graph is already a reality.

Wouln't the Hypothesis bookmarklet be preferable and easier to use?

From a discussion on DEVONthink alternatives for Windows users.

https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae

Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.

These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.

It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.

These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.

Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.

Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships

One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.

If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.

The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.

Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?

Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.

It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.

Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.

I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?

Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/

Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.

Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/

Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEycdHEQrco

See also the author's (Eva Keiffenheim) article on RoamBrain: THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR BUILDING A ZETTELKASTEN WITH ROAM RESEARCH

https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

This useless knowledge graph is one of the worst parts about Roam Research. It is bad UI and wholly unusable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnfSs6Hu3k

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-xxxx

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

https://github.com/mathieudutour/gatsby-digital-garden

A set of packages to create a digital garden with Gatsby.

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-xxxviii

Sönke Ahrens uses block references in Roam Research as zettels (or atomic notes), but puts them into larger pages almost as if he was pre-building larger project pages, as described in his book.

A good way to think about Roam vs. Notion.

Notion is more for the "architects" and Roam is better suited for the "gardeners."

The thing is, we ALL have parts of our life that require precision and parts where we need creativity. Both tools might be used successfully.

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

An example of a user who is (no longer) centralizing everything into one place. Also an example of a person overloading their use of note taking tool as a melting pot of data. Do they have a mental map of how to separate the pieces to get the value out of their system?

It seems like they want it to "just work" without any conception of what this looks like

Example of someone who doesn't appreciate the work of note taking.

https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

https://github.com/adithyabsk/tftbot

A Twitter bot that will tweet out data from your PMK tools. Presumably this is for spaced repetition or a goal towards creating combinatorial creativity.

https://www.goedel.io/p/tft-performance-roam-research

I always thought of the #RoamCult hashtag as a bit tongue-in-cheek, but certainly something with a more positive framing could be chosen.

It's interesting to hear that the project seems to have gone quiet and that the perception is that people are leaving for other projects (many of them open source, which is one of the spaces many of the early adopters were already working in).

There's definitely a drive in a lot of this space for people to own their own data given it's direct value to them over other (more social facing) tools.

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-XXXIV

The level of complexity to using some of these tools is also a huge hurdle for the everyday user as well. Some require deep knowledge of the tool along with coding ability as well.

Perhaps this complexity barrier will come down over time, but some projects don't seem to be working toward making things easier and simpler for the end user.

This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

** For roam-ref

Protocol 2!

The way to export Instapaper annotations to Roam without using Readwise as a middleware

Alasdair Ekpenyong's Digital Garden

Alasdair is an academic in the area of library science.

https://systemcrafters.cc/build-a-second-brain-in-emacs/getting-started-with-org-roam/

https://roambrain.com/how-my-road-led-to-roam/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381953081697562625.html

Sounds like Dave Winer is tinkering around getting Little Outliner to work with Roam or Roam like structures? He certainly might have some useful ideas for Flancian in terms of cobbling together all these note taking / wiki-like platforms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TO-OkIMtI

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

Is this similar to the mixing of a daily journal page with note taking seen in systems like Roam Research and the way some use Obsidian?

A free email course for Roam Research.

There's apparently a product that will turn one's Roam Research notes into a digital garden.

Great to see a bridge for making these things easier for the masses, but I have to think that there's a better and cheaper way. Perhaps some addition competition in the space will help bring the price down.

https://bzawilski.medium.com/using-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-learn-more-effectively-333ac90d001a

Facile overview article that touches on the basics but looses sight of the longer flow of history.

Don't recommend.

https://dev.to/tmhall99/beyond-taking-notes-or-how-i-joined-the-roamcult-22k3

Lots of resources on the topic to start down a rabbit hole, but no clear outline or thesis of what is going on or why it's useful. At best a list of potentially useful links for getting started.

Revisiting this essay to review it in the framing of digital gardens.

In a "gardens and streams" version of this metaphor, the stream is flow and the garden is stock.

This also fits into a knowledge capture, growth, and innovation framing. The stream are small atomic ideas flowing by which may create new atomic ideas. These then need to be collected (in a garden) where they can be nurtured and grow into new things.

Clippings of these new growth can be placed back into the stream to move on to other gardeners. Clever gardeners will also occasionally browse through the gardens of others to see bigger picture versions of how their gardens might become.

Proper commonplacing is about both stock and flow. The unwritten rule is that one needs to link together ideas and expand them in places either within the commonplace or external to it: essays, papers, articles, books, or other larger structures which then become stock for others.

While some creators appear to be about all stock in the modern era, it's just not true. They're consuming streams (flow) from other (perhaps richer) sources (like articles, books, television rather than social media) and building up their own stock in more private (or at least not public) places. Then they release that article, book, film, television show which becomes content stream for others.

While we can choose to create public streams, but spending our time in other less information dense steams is less useful. Better is to keep a reasonably curated stream to see which other gardens to go visit.

Currently is the online media space we have structures like microblogs and blogs (and most social media in general) which are reasonably good at creating streams (flow) and blogs, static sites, and wikis which are good for creating gardens (stock).

What we're missing is a structure with the appropriate and attendant UI that can help us create both a garden and a stream simultaneously. It would be nice to have a wiki with a steam-like feed out for the smaller attendant ideas, but still allow the evolutionary building of bigger structures, which could also be placed into the stream at occasional times.

I can imagine something like a MediaWiki with UI for placing small note-like ideas into other streams like Twitter, but which supports Webmention so that ideas that come back from Twitter or other consumers of one's stream can be placed into one's garden. Perhaps in a Zettelkasten like way, one could collect atomic notes into their wiki and then transclude those ideas into larger paragraphs and essays within the same wiki on other pages which might then become articles, books, videos, audio, etc.

Obsidian, Roam Research do a somewhat reasonable job on the private side and have some facility for collecting data, but have no UI for sharing out into streams.

An interesting tool for taking notes from Jeremy Ho. Designed with Roam Research in mind.

The Eloquent tool is available to install! Capture ideas in-context with:<br>• On-page highlighting<br>• Nested bullets<br>• /snippets<br>• [[braces]] and #tag syntax<br>Quick capture is a hotkey away. Bonus hotkey sends your highlights/links to @RoamResearch pic.twitter.com/vLLbPX4zwW

— Jeremy Ho (@jeremyqho) July 21, 2020

I wish it could save data as a local text or markdown file so it would also be easier to use with Obsidian or other note taking tools. It's similar in nature to the Roam Highlighter extension.

Details at https://www.notion.so/Eloquent-Resource-Center-72f95c2a71d34c5181e4907edf7a96e1

Some conventions may be emerging in a new batch of personal knowledge management tools, or amenable to them; for the duration of this document, we'll refer to these tools as [[personal knowledge management]] tools, [[roam like]] or (preferred as of the time of writing) [[wiki like]].

It would be incredibly useful to have a list of these [[Roam Research like]] tools so that they can be documented as to what level of input they can/could take and remain compatible from text, to text+[[wiki links]], to the various flavors of markdown up to full HTML perhaps.

I know a handful are documented at indieweb.org/commonplace_book

This word is exactly the point. What if this web page were a public thing within Roam? Then other people's notebooks could comment within their own, but using notifications (via Webmention) could be placed into a comments section at the bottom of one's page or even done inline on the portions they're commenting on using block references.

Notice the difference in user interface and onboarding between [[Notion]] and [[Roam Research]].

But why can't it do both?

Because it's on the same platform, they could allow people to make their notes public and shareable. They could add Webmention support so that one notebook could talk to another!

C'mon people!!? Don't you remember the dream of the Memex?

This is the first reference I've heard about [[Athens]], but there are many others that aren't mentioned here including Obsidian, Foam, TiddlyWiki, etc. which have been adding the backlinking capabilities.

They don't unless you're building a wiki or commonplace book that can interact with those of others. (Roam research isn't doing this---yet, but they should.) Ideally small building block pieces will allow it to dovetail with other systems that could potentially do the same thing.

Tim Kling posits that one of the most important features for a note taking app to have (which most lack at the time of writing) is the ability to link to other notes with the wiki-standard double bracket command.

正是目前阶段需要的自下而上的笔记整理

There was a steep learning curve involved with using ECCO Pro. Reminds me of Roam, which also has a steep learning curve, but then it feels like it's worth it.

ECCO Pro was loved for its ability to do a lot of different things versus being good at one narrow thing. Reminds me of Roam Research.

With the advent of search engines, search as a paradigm for retrieving files has become ubiquitous.

Impressed by this comment. It foreshadows what Roam would become:

• People think in terms of items belonging to multiple hierarchies
• If you allow users to describe items in a way that makes sense to them and allow them to search and browse by any of the terms they've used, you've solved many of the problems of existing file systems

What you need to build a complex information system is:

• Deep hierarchies for classifying things (overlapping hierarchies should be possible)
• Shallow hierarchies for noting relationships (Roam does this with a flat structure)
• Multi-values for every single field
• Controlled values (e.g. linking to other items when possible)

Although Bush envisioned associative trails to be navigable sequences of original content and notes interspersed, what seems to make more sense when viewed through today's technology, is a rich document of notes where the relevant pieces from external documents are transcluded.

The human mind doesn't work according to the file-cabinet metaphor — it operates by association.

"With one items in its gras, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

Bush emphasises the importance of retrieval in the storage of information. He talks about technical limitations, but in this paragraph he stresses that retrieval is made more difficult by the "artificiality of systems of indexing", in other words, our default file-cabinet metaphor for storing information.

Information in such a hierarchical architecture is found by descending down into the hierarchy, and back up again. Moreover, the information we're looking for can only be in one place at a time (unless we introduce duplicates).

Having found our item of interest, we need to ascend back up the hierarchy to make our next descent.

Retrieval is the key activity we're interested in. Storage only matters in as much as we can retrieve effectively. At the time of writing (1945) large amounts of information could be stored (extend the record), but consulting that record was still difficult.

Bush emphasises the need for notes to not only be stored, but also to be queried (consulted).

You need a system inside Roam which helps you review notes that are not yet refined.

Conor is asking himself, how do you get people to take (daily) notes, and how do you get them to refine them.

Good ideas come when ideas meet, so it is beneficial to promote this.

Conor's idea of Roam was a layer on top of the web where everyone can have their mental model of how the world works.

Conor was trying to figure out how to find out what's true online with Roam.

In one pane outliners the text is displayed under its parent.

This can be more conducive to writing because you're not splitting work on the organization from work on the content. In writing this separation is fuzzy anyway.

What Lotus Notes allowed you to do is to combine a hierarchical organized overview, achieved through an outliner, with search, hyperlinks and relational-database-like reports. Lotus Notes also allowed you to organized different document formats (Word, emails, etc.)

Users should program their own programs because they know their requirements the best.

[7]: Beck, K. and Cunningham, W. Using pattern languages for object-oriented programs. Tektronix, Inc. Technical Report No. CR-87-43 (September 17, 1987), presented at OOPSLA-87 workshop on Specification and Design for Object-Oriented Programming. Available online at http://c2.com/doc/oopsla87.html (accessed 17 September 2009)

What Joel says here about Contextual Backlinks is that they allow you to "bootstrap" a concept (i.e. start working with it) without explicit definitions coming into play (or as Andy would say, the content is empty).

Joel highlights a feature here of Roam and ties it to incremental formalisms.

In Roam you can update a page name and it propagates across all references.

This is the task that you're required to do when you want to save a note in Evernote or Notion. You need to choose where it goes.

Incremental formalism

Users enter information in an informal fashion. They only formalize later when the appropriate formalism becomes clear and/or immediately useful.

Formalisms enable synthesis to happen.

Nodes in a knowledge management system can be defined extensionally, rather than intensionally, through their backlinks and their respective context.

Bi-Directional links, or backlinks, only help define the node being linked to if the context in which the links occur is also provided.

Steve Jobs when given a tour at the Xerox PARC in 1979 was so struck by the GUI that they were developing that he could not even process the other things he was shown (Object Oriented Programming and Networked Computing).

"And within - you know - ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take. You could argue about who the winners or losers might be. You couldn't argue about the inevitability, it was obvious."

This reminds me of the moment Roam first clicked for me.

If you use Roam as a CRM, in your daily note you can simply tag a person you just had a meeting with and log some notes. Those notes will then show up under that person in the linked references under a block for the current date.

So in one sentence, with using only your keyboard, you've created a meeting note linked to a person and linked to a specific date.

With any other solution you'd have to navigate to a person, create an entry, set a date and write the note.

This "decide where to put it" step is completely replaced with "what entities does this pertain to".

You can also filter the references by Tags/Pages.

The unlinked references section is a great way to discover new relationships between information.

It's also an area where a digital Zettelkasten outperforms an analog one.

A big benefit of Roam is the speed with which you can make a link to a another page.

Nat's conclusion is correct, but his reason for arriving at that conclusion is wrong.

You're not faced with the question of where to put things with Roam because you can do the following:

(1) You can tag a new entry on the fly, in-line, CLI style. (2) If the tag exists, it will autocomplete, if it doesn't you can create it with no extra effort (3) Any tags you add are links to their respective pages, which allows you to (a) navigate their as soon as you've typed the tag/page name and (b) it creates a backlink on those pages so your new entry is automatically linked to from there.

Nat says that tags are everything and nothing, but I don't agree with that.

Pages consist of blocks.

A reference to a page is treated in the exact same way as a tag.

A block is not treated in the same way. A block is not a tag.

This section 6 is a key bit on how Roam can function as a much larger 2nd global brain.

Getting data into any of these note taking tools quickly always seems to be the most difficult part of the process.

The design of this, which predates that of the wiki, also seems eerily familiar as a digital version of a zettelkasten or the design which seems to underlie Roam Research's product.

emacs is pretty much an operating system. This makes it infinitely configurable and hard for new comers to grok.

Roam Research