I’ve been a fan of outliners ever since I stumbled across More while I was in college. Many a paper was written with More and later the MS Word outliner. I’ve had a fetish for them ever since. Today I got caught on an outliner meme and turned up some pretty cool stuff which I’ve collected as links. For anyone who needs a little free-form data storage tool that has a small memory footprint , take s moment to check outsome outliners. Links:

• Nice overview of available windows outliners
• atpm.com is running a great series of articles on outliners, including their history, some great information on how people use them and an explanation of the features available in the various outlining packages. The atpm articles get into exhaustive details on the available outliners for all OS’s too, despite their mac focus. (and the former mac junkie in me will point out how the innovation in this software comes mostly from the mac clients over the years).
• My current favorite (Leo) outliner, and another good one (Joe, the Java outliner), both cross platform (one Java, one tcl/tk).

The other interesting area of development is tying outline editors to wikis: I have great hopes for this class of software though so far nothing is to the point where I can really use it. I might manage to get a set of Leo templates going to manage this for me but I would prefer a turnkey solution. If you’re on a mac, you can check out the first halting steps towards this kind of system.