Sorry I don't want to sound disrespectul but I didn't found an quick and easy parsable description. If I would show this my parents, I wouldn't be sure if they could guess. :/
"Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base" ?????
It's essentially an app for taking notes and jotting down ideas, and you write them in markdown. You can link references to other notes within a note to link up ideas.
Here's a 12 minute demo that should give you an idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88
I'm not that quite in-depth with my usage of it. I essentially use it as a scratchpad for a few notes for work. But it does the job
A similar app, Roam Research, is the same story as Obsidian, only a few chapters ahead. Roam's marketing campaign actually referred to itself and its users as a literal cult.
Ultimately, like self help, it's all just more of the same - cashgrabs that make people feel like they're improving or achieving, with every self help quip they consoom, with every "second brain" note they take.
Ultimately, they're just games for wasting time - "tool games" [1].
These tools are technologically great, but they are not 10x better than notepad.exe
The marketing and hype around these tools are self perpetuating. Some twitter guru will post about these tools and get kickback or an increase in followers. People who pay for tools post about their experience online so they can signal to other people who have paid for this tool that yes, they now belong to the cool kids club too.
And there are content creators who's income depends on these tools. They will 'review' these tools, post a review online and unknown to most people, they will be getting some money for this review under the table.
I've also seen that this is all mostly limited to tech folks who consume too much of their info from Twitter and Youtube. None of my offline friends know about Obsidian, Roam, or the zillion productivity tools that are being produced.
That's cap. Obsidian is many, many times more powerful and useful than notepad.exe. It's a completely different class of product. It's virtually an operating system unto itself.
- blanket admonishment of others' efforts towards creativity and developing insights
which you already have and that can come only from inside your great mind.
Please fluoresce and share your brilliant illuminating light of self-made intelligence and inspiration upon us, the sheep-like, turf-sprawled, vibrating masses.
> Obsidian 1.0, the all-new Obsidian.
> A brand new look. A fresh way to browse. An exciting new start.
You could also be misled into thinking this is the home page.
The actual home page does a better job of getting to the point of what Obsidian is:
(And BTW, I recommend Obsidian, it's excellent)
You can build much more complicated systems with it (I also have it as my todo app and have it pulling out todos from all my notes and prioritising them), or you can use it as a slightly nicer version of using vs code with a folder of markdown files, which was my precious system (there's also Dendron, which is the same idea but as a vs code plugin).
So I'm thinking that this is a _ME_ problem and not necessarily a 'Product Description' problem.
After installing it, and typing in a few things I notice that it's similar to ZIM (another desktop wiki app) on the surface.
I also appreciate that you corrected my misuse of "markup" when I should have said markdown without making me feel like an idiot.
Again, don't want to sound disrespectful and I will definitely try the tool.
My obsidian has turned into a personal Wikipedia and it's crazy how much it's improved my efficiency.
The main difference is that your notes are stored in a readable plain text format.
But if you are interested in an open format, you may as well go the full route and use the similar open-source app logseq instead.
Or some subset(s) sure, fine. It's flexible. But the huge value is more readily apparent when it is all the documents (for some meaningul value of "all").
This google trends graph confirms my suspicion that it was a more common term back then: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=K...
Out of curiosity I tried to find older references. There are references using this definition back to at least 1995. Beyond that it's trickier because apparently "knowledge base" was used to describe the knowledge available to an AI system during the expert systems era, which is a somewhat different definition. e.g. Lehnert 1977: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED150955.pdf
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Vester#Networked_Thin...
