January 02, 2010

james fallows on thinking tools

James Fallows is a fantastic blogger, and has a history of doing great reviews of software “thinking tools” like outliners and Ecco and The Brain, etc. He’s back on the thinking tools warpath these past few days; pointing folks to Thinklinkr (a web-based collaborative outliner) and digging up some screenshots of GrandView, the DOS product that “many buffs consider…the best outliner ever invented.

Call it a new year’s fetish, but I’m trying to get back into thinking tools. And it’s depressing, because leaving aside the slew of everything buckets out there (all falling into the two- or three-paned note taking metaphor), there really hasn’t been much advancement in tools that help you capture, organize and interlink random bits of data since, well, The Brain. Or am I missing something?