I recently bought a copy of Eastgate’s Tinderbox meme management system. Amazing. It’s one of those tools that exudes a sense of ??????(shibumi) and austerity; simple and emergingly complex at the same time.
What is it, exactly? Eastgate’s website calls it “a personal content management assistant.” Ted Goranson at ATPM writes some of the best koans about Tinderbox:
“Tinderbox is partly a tool and partly an environment for creating your own tool.”
“It isn’t something you buy and just use; it is something you adapt and invent over time.”
And although the most accessible way to start using it is as an outliner (and what I was looking for originally), Ted hits again with:
“Tinderbox is not really an outliner at all; it is more of an environment for annotation-rich information architectures.”
Yeah. It’s all of those. And more.
Some Tinderbox users created their own weblogs with it; others have adapted it to codify David Allen’s classic Getting Things Done into a GTD system.
I’ll probably evolve to using it for all of these things, and more.
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