interesting article. It is always good to see people explain how they tackle problems like this - which are just as common as 'word processing' tasks we are used now to having support with.

I use a great tool for this - which people may not know about - so here is some info.

the tool is tinderbox from eastgate systems.
(www.eastgate.com).

It accepts notes and lets you organize them hierarchically and/or as a network (using hyperinks). It has agents which can gather all the notes that match a given criteria - these work dynamically so they are perfect for keyword detection as in Jon's example.
And it has the map view - to arrange topics visually.

Check it out.

Dave Garbutt
(not all anonymous posts are from me ;-)