Meadow helps you improve the clarity of your thinking and grow your influence.
Meadow helps you share topic-specific portions of your connected notes with the world. We make it fast and simple to extract and publish rich "microsites" from portions of your connected notes.
You pick one of your notes, work with Meadow's UI for less than a minute to establish a boundary around the related notes to publish, and hit publish. That's it. Your microsite is live and ready to be shared with others!
Let's step back and build up the problem and solution step-by-step. First, let's talk about why connected notes are great.
People have learned that best way to organize digital notes, to come to new insights, is to keep them in the same place, with no folders and to densely link between them. This creates huge "graphs" of interconnected notes where it is easy to click between them to make novel connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, which can lead to profound insights.
The notes' conceptual nature and small size, in addition to connected structure invites reflection, because as you add new notes and link to related notes, you revisit and refine your conceptual notes over time. It's a nearly ideal way to deeply engage with the topics that matter the most to you.
The problems start when you want to share your ideas with others. Perhaps you want to share a note and ask for feedback. But what is "a note", exactly? Is it just the note by itself? The note links to a bunch of other notes that provide important context. Should you include those notes in the published microsite, too? What about the notes that those notes point to?
You can try to avoid the problem by manually writing a blog post instead. You read all the related connected notes and then write up a standard blog post that summarizes everything relevant. But that takes a lot of writing and editing, and frankly might be enough of a barrier that you won't get around to it. You could do something simpler like write a couple of tweets about a handful of the interesting ideas in your notes, but then you'd be leaving all the nuance behind.
Wouldn't it be nice to just be able to share portions of the notes you already have, quickly?
We briefly touched on the challenges of sharing connected notes, above, but let's really explore the problem now.
You can't simply push a button to publish a connected note. Why? Because as we mentioned above, they are densely linked and connect disparate ideas. Consider this: when we share the initial note, we should probably also share the notes that that note directly connects to. That's great because it lets your reader explore the directly related ideas, too.
But what about the notes that those notes connect to? If the publishing tool starts from the initial note and just automatically follows the links out in the densely linked graph of notes, you'll often find that it will output hundreds or even thousands of notes if you have a reasonably large set of connected notes.
Perhaps that number of notes is ok, but the notes are densely connected across many topic areas. That means that sometimes the contents of the notes in the outer reaches of what you publish may not be what you expect!
As a quick, specific, example: you might want share some really cool area you have been thinking about with that smart neighbor down the street, but you accidentally share some of your recent medical history notes too, because they happened to be mentioned in a shared TODO note 8 layers in. Your neighbor, being a smart and diligent guy, clicks deep and bumps into those medical notes. Whoops, that's pretty embarrassing!
You can see how you'd want to be able to share the initial note and then manage what connected information gets shared as well. Basically, you'd like to establish a logical boundary around the content you publish.
We talk about "managing" a boundary around your published content. That sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?
It's doesn't need to be! With Meadow, it takes less than a minute to work with AI to establish a logical boundary around what you want to share, and to publish a rich, connected "microsite" of connected notes.
We have developed purpose-built, private, local, and open source tooling where a local AI model identifies a cohesive theme starting from the initial node. It automatically identifies off-topic branches and surfaces them for your review. Meadow also provides flexible manual filtering as well.
Once you have drawn the boundary, the AI helps you coherently tie up dangling links to notes outside the boundary. It does that by either turning the links into plain text, or doing more careful replacement or redaction, depending on the sensitivity of the notes being pointed to.
This co-agency, where the AI works directly with you, but you remain in control, means that an otherwise challenging process becomes quick and easy.
Once Meadow creates your microsite, which is just a set of html files under a directory, you can use any host on the Internet, or save time and use Meadow's easy hosting platform; setup takes only a minute.
With Meadow, you can keep your ideal connected notes process, but also share your ideas with others quickly and easily.