(2002-04-10) d

Raph Levien of Advogato on Instant Outlining. What is interesting is that Dave seems to have made propagation of annotated links extremely easy, but still under manual control. Because of the manual control, the trust issues are manageable. If you read the testimonials on Dave's site, you'll comparisons to EMail, which of course gets its trust all wrong and suffers badly from it.

I don't think Instant Outlining gets everything right. Browsing through some OPML files, I see some dissonance: between the flow of time and the tree, between missives and replies (they don't seem to be formally linked), between freeform text and formal structure, and between freshness and permanence. But at least they're playing with these concepts for real.

I also think that tree-structured outlines are a very useful concept, and underappreciated in today's world.