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What—exactly—are backlinks?
A brief introduction to the secret weapon of networked note-taking applications
This is one of several posts on backlinks. There’s this super basic intro to backlinks, a post on understanding and navigating your backlinks, and another on using backlinks to generate information. These are part of a series of posts on topics I searched for when I first started exploring networked note-taking apps like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, and Reflect.
In networked note-taking apps like Roam Research, Obsidian, Reflect, and others, it’s easy to link from one note to another. Typically, this uses wiki link format, so you can link to things as fast as you can type. To link from Note A to Note B, you type “[[Note B]]”, and, like magic, you’ve created a link.
Linking to things as fast as you can type is an important capability that helps make networked note-taking app tools for thought.
In this example note, I surrounded the phrase, “Backlink tips”, with square brackets (“[[…]]”) to create a link.
If you look at Daily note 1, you can see the other notes it links to. It links to Backlink tips.
The trick with networked note-taking apps: they also show you the notes that link to the note you’re on.
