Jorge Arango: Duly Noted – Episode 175

Content Strategy Insights

Jorge Arango The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been scarce. Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights. We talked about: the motivation for his new book, Duly Noted how his personal experience with note-taking, the emergence of the digital media, and his background as an information architect converged to inspire his interest in digital networked note-taking the challenge presented to note-takers by the huge variety of kinds of notes, and his taxonomy of types of notes some of the history of computers as tools to augment our cognitive capabilities his concept of the "personal knowledge garden" his take on Brian Eno's articulation of the differences between architecture and gardening the differences between thinking spaces and writing spaces the difference in mental models applied when moving between physical and digital note-taking media the rise of hypertext-based note-taking tools how your content-strategy skills around structured content help your note-taking and knowledge gardening Jorge's bio Jorge Arango is an information architect, author, and educator. For almost three decades, he has architected digital experiences and made the complex clear for organizations ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations. He is the author of Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places and co-author of Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, the fourth edition of O'Reilly's celebrated Polar Bear book. In addition to his design consulting practice, Jorge hosts The Informed Life podcast, writes a blog, and teaches at the California College of the Arts. Connect with Jorge online LinkedIn jarango.com DulyNoted.fyi Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/E8ngDQ33K2c Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 175. Throughout our days, we are all taking note of things for a variety of reasons in a number of ways. A to-do list on your computer. A scribble in the margin of a book. A blog post idea in a Google doc. In his new book, Duly Noted, Jorge Arango sets out principles and practices to create a digital note-taking regimen and then shows you how to connect and cultivate your notes in a personal knowledge garden where you can gather your thoughts and harvest insights. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 175 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jorge Arango. Jorge is an independent information architect. He's an author. He's an educator, and I asked him on the show today to talk about his new book, Duly Noted. So welcome, Jorge. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Jorge: Hey Larry, thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here. And as you have noted, I have a new book called Duly Noted, and I'm excited about that. As you also mentioned, I'm an information architect. That's what I do for a living, and I have been doing that for a long time, and what gets me out of bed these days is the fact that we have access to all this information in the world, and those of us who work in this space have been part of making it possible for there to be more information in the world than there's ever been before. And that's a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. I'm very focused on the good... Let's make it good. So that's what gets me motivated and we can talk more about what that means in the context of this book.