MOC: Map of Content

What is an MOC

An MOC (Map of Content) is a curated cluster of related information around some area of interest.

At a glance, it may look like just an index of notes. But an MOC is not only for organizing scattered notes, but also provides an opportunity to think, deepen your understanding, discover connections, and distill ideas. Building and maintaining an MOC is therefore part of the value it provides.

This overlaps with some of the purposes of Hub Notes and Structure Notes in the Zettelkasten method.

In a note-taking app, an MOC might be a grouped list of links to related notes, with short summaries and annotations. But the idea is not limited to digital notes. It could also be a physical collection of index cards, or even “A detective’s wall of suspects with strings linking people and objects of interest together”. Just as the detective thinks hard to figure out the hidden information by connecting the dots, the process of building the map itself is also important.

Can AI Agents Help?

When you have hundreds or thousands of notes, collecting and curating relevant information can become a lot of toil. Today, AI agents can help with some of this mechanical work and the boring stuff: finding related notes, grouping them, and summarizing their contents.

However, an MOC is also a thinking tool. AI may suggest connections or questions, but deciding which connections matter, questioning them, and distilling them into meaningful insights still requires human judgment.

With support from AI agents, we can spend less time on the tedious parts of maintaining an MOC and focus more on the thinking part.

# Event processing

## Transporting events
- [[Kafka]] — useful as the shared event bus between services

## Processing events
- [[Kafka consumers]] — should probably stay lightweight
- [[Sidekiq]] — useful for application-level asynchronous work

        ↑↑↑ AI agents can help with things like the above ↑↑↑

## Open questions 
- Should a Kafka consumer directly execute business logic?
- Or should it enqueue a Sidekiq job?

## Emerging idea
Kafka and Sidekiq solve problems at different layers:
Kafka distributes events between services; Sidekiq manages work inside an application.

        ↑↑↑ But things like the above should be done with human judgment ↑↑↑

Refs

• https://blog.linkingyourthinking.com/notes/mocs-overview
• https://blog.linkingyourthinking.com/notes/mocs-(defn)
• https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/
• https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/
• https://writing.bobdoto.computer/the-difference-between-hub-notes-and-structure-notes-explained/
• https://obsidian.rocks/maps-of-content-effortless-organization-for-notes/
• https://www.ssp.sh/brain/map-of-content-moc/
• https://notedog.run/moc-agent

Quotes from the Refs

An MOC is a cluster of information that maps “things” in context with other “things”.

An M—O—C is a cluster of information that maps “things” in context with other “things”.

MOCs help you do three things: gather, develop, and navigate your ideas.

Maps of Content are special notes that you can create to help organize your notes.