Notes Compound, Blogs Compile: When I Update a Note vs. Publish a Post

I like to collect notes over time on my Second Brain, and eventually, when I figure something substantial to share, something I learned, I write a blog post about it.

The second brain helps me to share whatever is in my mind, and the blog helps me to refine.

Notes are compounding and are long-term updates, whereas blog posts are long-term too, but capture the current time of publishing. I share more about how everything compounds, including knowledge, in Long-Term Strategy for Blogging.

E.g. Compounding Note-Taking note on this very site looks like this:

You see the last updates, the creation date (when it was created in my private Obsidian vault), and the published date, when it was first uploaded to this page.

So this note will continue to update on its own whenever I find something new to add, a link, or a thought, like this paragraph I’m writing now. From Second Brain Design Updates which triggered this note to update, to then at some point compile into a full blown article as I have done at Why I Still Blog — and Why the Future of Blogging Is Connected with my ten years of writing in public with many concepts from here, from Future of Blogging, etc. complied into a one time blog. This blog won’t get updated. I might write follow-ups like this The Process of Smart Note-Taking or even The Act and the Outcome of Creation, but I won’t change the old one.

But while these blog posts got published, I updated the notes they link to multiple times. So, the notes get updated over time and might lead to another blog post, or just serve as a separate artifact to read and learn in a more connected way.

If you ever thought about ’notes vs. a newsletter’, or a ’tweet vs. a blog post’, I think this note is for you, then in my opinion, Notes Compound, Blogs Compile.

The tweets are obviously not the notes I mean, as these are only brief artifacts gone shortly after, but notes in your note-taking app of choice, and when to compile an article from these.
I like how No Boilerplate YT explains how notes compiler to essays (blog).

Source: What do you do after taking notes? with the Zettelkasten method, which I use as well

These can also result in other Types of Writings, such as a book, other Types of Content Online, such as an abstract, dissertation, case study, etc.

Note taking, compiling and writing an essay is also very much what Sönke Ahrens said in his book Smart Note Taking, one of my favorite book on note taking (Thanks so much DeepRead to point that out):

The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity. We extract information from different linear sources and mix it all up and shake it until new patterns emerge. Then, we form these patterns into new linear texts. ^d8aeee

In a similar comparison, writing on paper vs. digital has also different meanings and values. See more at Digital vs Paper.

• How To Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens (Book summary) - DeepRead shared at Tweet

Origin: @ssp.sh on Bluesky
References: Future of Blogging