As we narrowed our focus on Gluino, we came across another term for digital second brains. Some people call them Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PMKs).

These systems are a way to collect and manage the information in one’s life for reference, research, and retrieval. When discussing Taigo Forte and Second Brains, you discuss organizing and building your PKM.

There are a bunch of tools out there for doing this:

To name a couple. Each of these tools has two primary components:

  • You can enter text, pictures, and thoughts into a file.
  • You can link files together.

Linking files together creates what some people refer to as a knowledge graph. If you check out r/ObsidianMD, you will see countless posts about knowledge graphs. There is a whole field called graph theory that discusses vertices and edges. While these graphs are very cool, their interconnected nature provides data about how information is connected.

The problem with PKMs, or at least my PKM, is that organizing all the data is incredibly manual. The system user has to organize notes into folders and provide links from one document to another. What if you realize something is tangential later but haven’t connected it? Sometimes, finding a document you are searching for by idea instead of exact text can be complicated. This happens to me weekly, if not more frequently.

Could I be better about linking my documents? Yes, without question. That being said, I don’t always know how to use information in the future. I’m not sure about connections until an idea comes to me. Searching and analyzing information text is one thing that computers are very good at.

One of my friends who also uses a PKM system and knows what Gluino is and that I’m working on it asked:

If gluino could magically parse my obsidian docs that would be very cool Seems like a real hard ass problem though

He is right. This is a tricky problem, but it is worthwhile. It is one of the many avenues ahead of us with Gluino.

Related is the notion that the amount of data available in this information age is enormous. Knowing which data to trust is challenging, as is finding the signal among the noise. One of the reasons I created a PKM is to combine the information I trust with the information I don’t and comment on it. I’m excited about a system that even marginally better understands the information I trust.

While this post doesn’t magically reveal a feature or future, it represents how I process and think through this problem. I hope it helps some.

If you stumble upon this post and use a PKM or are starting to use one, we are researching the community. If you have a second and are inclined, please complete our survey.