When someone says outline it takes me back to grade school writing lessons which for me was not a good experience. One third grade teacher (link to the work when I was the third grade teacher) brought me to a meeting with my parents after multiple warnings that they should work with me each week to learn to spell the ten assigned words. I was learning the ten words but still was the only third grader to flunk spelling three 6 weeks in a row. We get to this meeting and the teacher pulls out our test called "Dictation" On each on I correctly spelled the ten words assigned that week. However most all of the other words in each of the ten sentences were horribly misspelled.
Somehow my contempt for the word Outline is derived from that experience.
I'm starting to see the ability to collapse and expand is something different. If that is what they mean by Outline I just might play along nicely.
Outline promotion.
This hasn't been said often or emphatically enough, so I'll boldface it: Blogs are outlines, and blogging is a form of outlining. This occurred to me during the panel on weblogs at Supernova on Tuesday.
I was writing in an outliner, and I was doing it fast ? about as fast as it can be done. And I'm not saying that because I'm vain about my typing. I'm saying it because I was using a tool that greatly speeds the process: an outliner. Radio Userland's, to be precise.
In the Weblog session, Dave said "Weblogs are the word processors of the Web." It's no coincidence that my favorite word processor, one I still use, is MORE, the direct ancestor of the Radio outliner. Even some of the keyboard commands are the same.
One of the cool things about an outliner like Radio's is the way it lets you organize what you say by processes like promote/demote, collpase/expand and hoist/dehoist. I won't explain them here, but I will tell you they are very handy once you get to know them. They even help me organize what I'm thinking and writing about, which is saying a lot.
In fact, I just used outlining features to quickly reorganize my blog/outline after moving (actually copying) all of my Day 1 reporting over to its own "story page, where it should have been in the first place. [Later... I just added Day 2] [The Doc Searls Weblog]
9:41:47 AM 
|
