Personal Knowledge Management

Status:

For the past twenty years, I've been using Microsoft OneNote as the mainstay of my knowledge management system or "second brain". I especially valued being able to:

access it from PC, laptop, iPad, and mobile phone;
save a web page into it directly from my browser;
dictate a quick note while on the go; and
use my iPad to write freehand notes or draw sketches directly into OneNote.

Where it fell short was in the connecting of ideas to help me think through problems. Early in 2025, I read about the open-source combination of Zotero and Obsidian. They seemed more forward-looking and a better match for my needs, so I tried them out. First impressions are good; I like them, and Obsidian in particular offers interesting possibilities.

One of these possibilities is an Obsidian plug-in called Smart Connections. This embeds my Obsidian notes in a vector database, similar to an AI's knowledge store. Smart Connections uses semantic similarity rather than exact keyword matches to connect ideas across my notes. When working on a note in Obsidian, I can now see links to other notes with related content; I can look for connections and think creatively about them. I can also give Smart Connections a query, e.g. "What makes for good writing?", and it will show me my notes which help answer that question. All of this makes it easier to discover meaningful relationships between different pieces of information. And it happens entirely on my local computer with no online involvement, thus preserving privacy.

Another possibility is to connect Obsidian to an AI. This will open up many interesting ways to explore and develop my ideas. It also opens me to the temptation of outsourcing my thinking to the machine, and it poses a risk to my privacy. The temptation to outsource thinking is a pernicious danger, bringing us round full circle to the need for an ethos of caring about how the Human-AI relationship evolves. The privacy issue, however, is manageable if we work with a local LLM.