Until a few years ago, I relied heavily on bookmarking as a means to keep track of sources of information and to comment on them. I used Delicious, Pinboard, and other bookmarking solutions, and I maintained long lists that I shared with the larger community.

Then, perhaps two years ago, I started trying curation-oriented solutions like Dispatch (see Dispatch is a social layer for file-based collaboration, Dispatch.io is now at the center of my work flow), Honey (see Honey is a co-curation tool with aspirations), and even tools intended for social communities like Mighty Bell (see Mightybell builds community through co-curation). However, since I am primarily managing these bodies of information as a repository for me to return to later, rather than as a means to communicate to others, curation tools become unwieldy after a certain amount of information is poured into them: they aren’t organized for my sort of use.

As a result, I started trying online outlining tools, like Workflowy (see Small pieces, even more loosely joined, where I discussed moving to Workflowy from Pinboard). Workflowy implements an infinite (in principle) outline, and has a range of features. For example, it was possible to treat any node as a separate web page with a unique URL so that I could create a task in other tools pointing to a node.

However, I found that Workflowy had features I am not interested in — like treating each node in the outline as a task that could be ‘completed’ — and lacked some that increasingly I longed for — like styled text in notes, and file attachments.

I was searching for an alternative, and I encountered a really great tool, the preposterously named The Outliner Of Giants (TOOG).

TOOG allows a user to create any number of separate outlines (in the for-fee version), unlike Workflowy where I was forced to manage everything in one gigantic outline. But more importantly, TOOG offers a number of great features for my purposes:

• Every node has a note file (called a ‘Wiki’, although it doesn’t seem to support wiki-like behavior), and that note file can be styled using either Textile, Markdown, or a Rich Text Editor. This is an outline specific setting, but can be changed at any time. I am using Markdown, and I’m using a bookmarklet from 5typos.net that capture the title and URL of the current webpage, as well as any selected text
• Outlines can be published, or shared with coeditors.
• Outlines or nodes can be ‘cloned’ and embedded elsewhere in the same or other outlines.

Here’s my current list of outlines. I haven’t imported all of the material in Workflowy yet, but luckily the two tools both support OPML as a means of moving outlines.

Here’s a section of my research outline (which now has over 500 nodes):

You can see the document icon near the ‘edit’ in several of the nodes, which indicate the presence of files uploaded to the outline. So my commentary on articles can actually include pdfs of the articles, when useful. Also the blue text represents URLs.

There are many controls for outline nodes. They can be promoted to a higher level in the outline, and ultimately to be an independent one. Likewise, nodes can be demoted. Nodes can be archived, cloned, split (haven’t tried that yet), labeled (assigned a color), prioritized, tagged, dated, and hoisted. Hoisting means to be displayed as the top-most node in the view, but still remaining in the embedding outline.

Sharing with coeditors feels a bit like an afterthought, since there doesn’t seem to be any comment threads or side notes, and the identity of the creator of a node isn’t shown anywhere. But I imagine a convention of using different colors (‘labels’) for outline nodes or typing your name in the notes could handle that in small groups. For example, there is no way to filter for nodes created by specific users —

— but if in a shared outline we agreed to tag with names like ‘@stowe’ or to use specific colors, that would work.

I have published my research outline, which is one of the ‘outline actions’ supported:

You can see the outline as a webpage (although links aren’t active), an outline (where the links are active, but the files aren’t attached), and supposedly as a blog (but that doesn’t seem to work).

The calendar option is odd: it doesn’t display a calendar based on optional date fields, it create a calendar to subscribe to. I haven’t been able to get it to work with Google Calendar, but I am not really planning on dating the entries manually. It might be helpful if the tool supported automatically dating based on creation dates.

I haven’t fooled much with the customization options —

— or the keyboard shortcuts —

— of which there look to be dozens. I will have to print that out.

The Bottom Line 

The Outliner Of Giants provides the support I need to maintain a growing corpus of research information, and I think it will scale with me.

Because each node can be hoisted — made the focal point — then each has a unique URL, so I can use a specific node as the target of a task in my task management too, Todoist. This is essential to my workflow (see  Small pieces, even more loosely joined).

I will experiment with the sharing options, but since I a principally organizing this information for my own purposes, and only secondarily for others, I think the individual user experience is what matters most.