The Storyspace map view has proven to be enormously useful and durable, letting writers express relationships by clustering as well as by linking. Other spatial hypertext systems -- especially VIKI and VKB (Cathy Marshall, then at Xerox PARC and Frank Shipman, Texas A&M) and ART (Kumiyo Nakakoji, NIST) provided inspiration and encouragement as well. The export template mechanism was sketched in a long discussion at Hypertext '98 with Marc and Jocelyn Nanard (Montpellier) and Daniel Schwabe (PUC, Brazil), and the Nanard's brilliant work on MacWeb demonstrated that Tinderbox agents were in fact viable. Elli Mylonas, David Durand, and Steve DeRose motivated the central role of XML. Mitch Kapor's Agenda was an early inspiration, and James Fallows demonstrated, in essays on Agenda and Zoot, that writers could and would use sophisticated agents.

Holy mackerel, when I saw the subject line of this topic I thought about Zoot – which I have not thought about in many months, and not for many years before that. Zoot was my introduction to this sort of “everything bucket” app. I also tried Info Select – which is also on Windows and may be an answer to @Claude’s question, assuming it’s still updated – and then to DevonThink and Evernote. My introduction to Zoot was an article by journalist James Fallows, of all people. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and reports mainly on public policy and politics. I wonder if he is still using Zoot? Three more probable options: Microsoft OneNote will be the most accessible to most Windows users. It doesn’t get you the search and “see also” of DevonThink. Obsidian and Roam Research take a different approach to the content-organization problems than DevonThink/OneNote/Evernote do. They rely on links and backlinks, like a personal Wikipedia. But they achieve the same goal of organizing information. They have search. AFAIK there’s nothing comparable to “see also,” but users report the same kind of serendipitous connections just by following the links they themselves made in the past. Another liability of Roam and Obsidian compared with DT: DT supports pretty much any kind of document that your computer can read, whereas Obsidian only supports Markdown, PDF, and images. I’m not as familiar with Roam, but I believe it has the same limitations. P.S. Partial answer to my own question: Fallows comes up in this forum as a person who advocated DT in a 2005 NYTimes article about “everything bucket” apps.