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Digital Tools I Wish Existed

jborichevskiy.com

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Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#31

Post by flancian »

WillYouFinish wrote: post #27
flancian wrote: post #25

This is what I want as well. I feel as if this is the kind of thing Google might still be able to get right; "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is still the company's mission, after all, although it's been diluted by ten years in the wilderness of developing products in what seems like all directions. If Google had not strayed Keep would be this. Assistant would be thi…

The issue with Google is, that Google doesn’t care about privacy and randomly changes its behavior, like recently closing thousands of accounts for using the live chat in YouTube. This company isn’t trustworthy. I’d prefer such applications to run offline with automatic instant synchronization, so no company can tell me what to do or not to do.

I understand why you think that, and you might be right. But I also know there are a lot of good people at Google, and I dream of the company waking up as a group again and focusing on its mission responsibly. Doing the right thing, openly.

Having said that, I personally also think that social networks and other internet technologies should run on a federated protocol: my current (early stage) proposal for the kind of thing we should try to do with this technology is https://flancia.org/agora. I see it as compatible/synergistic with the post we're discussing.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#32

Post by polytely »

thundergolfer wrote: post #2

The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping. For me, this is the lynchpin: > "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine) Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your curre…

> "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming."

I think The Syllabus [2] is kinda like this for a certain type of content (mostly academic). It aims to find stuff that doesn't get attention in the regular surveillance capitalistic hellscape that is the internet. It's run by Evgeny Morozov, someone who's thinking I admire.

Currently, my online reading is mainly based on hn (and multiple sources that often get posted here [0]), The Browser [1], The Syllabus [2] and people I follow on Mastodon and Twitter. Basically in absence of how to find content for my future self, I look for content that is being recommended by people I admire.

[0]: laphamsquarterly.org, slatestarcodex.com, ribbonfarm.com, etc.

[1]: thebrowser.com

[2]: the-syllabus.com

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#33

Post by BenGosub »

I have been thinking about these questions as well. The gist is, it seems we need tools to manage data created from all the applications that we use. Today, there's so much data, that the most important tools are those that separate signal from noise.

Some things that I have considered: - I like to read long articles on my e-paper reader, there are several services to do this. - I need all quotings from articles, books and my personal notes to be accessible in one place, indexed and searchable. - My whole knowledge base should be easily shared with other people. - I want to find others with similar interests to mine.

Some interesting technologies that have the potential of bringing this to reality is the Beaker browser and the Dat format for sharing. Also, I really like World Brain's memex for web annotation, searching and sharing.

It seems we are getting closer, but we need to connect the different tools into a widely used workflow.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#35

Post by amoghs »

Obair (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/obair/jffaiidojfhf...) is a variant of the memex idea mentioned. It's not quite a universal memex for your digital life (which by the way is really inspiring) but rather made specifically for work docs across different work tools.

Disclaimer: I'm working on it and it's really early in the process :) Should I make Obair more broad?

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#36

Post by amoghs »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #13
smacktoward wrote: post #4

> Content is published in a variety of formats including but not limited to images, sound files, videos, Google Drive docs, diagrams, long-from paywalled articles, PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and base 64 encoded blobs. One of the great disappointments I’ve had working in tech for 20 years now has been the way we’ve transformed the entire spectrum of human expression, which includes wildly different forms of art a…

> Every time I hear a child say they want to grow up to be a “content creator,” Do kids really say this? If so I'm going to kill myself.

Yes. I'm not a boomer but I do feel like one sometimes.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#37

Post by eXpl0it3r »

What purpose does this collection of information really serve? I like having things organized neatly and easily accessible, but I have a hard time seeing what goal thousands of scattered annotations, text bookmarks, podcast bookmarks, etc. serve.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#38

Post by marionzualo »

Thanks for writing this. This is awesome.

What I see missing is an ecosystem of interoperable tools.

It would be great if I could have a location/format in which all my digital knowledge is stored. And then be able to use different tools which support multiple processes/flows:

* a flow for discovering content

* a flow for archiving the highlights I take on the web

* a flow for writing notes

it would be great if I could change any tool while keeping the flow intact.

The only thing that somehow mirrors this is Evernote + Readwise + IFTT. There are tons of integrations that allow you to populate Evernote from tweets, Highly, Kindle highlights, etc. What I would love is if I could easily swap Evernote with any other editor (e.g. Bear) without changing much.

I wouldn't mind paying for these tools I would just like this personal knowledge software to work in a way in which you can natively add blocks/functionality to it. Most of them have huger vendor lock in.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#39

Post by marionzualo »

thundergolfer wrote: post #2

The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping. For me, this is the lynchpin: > "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine) Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your curre…

> I think that content feeds need to incorporate goal-orientation and move away from right-here-right-now orientation

I think part of the issue with the current inbound content queues (e.g. Instapaper, Pocket) is that they treat all content the same. There is a difference between content I need immediately from content my future self will find interesting in the future.

there should be a way to rank/aggregate content according to this.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#40

Post by Jeff_Brown »

Hode[1] (the Higher Order Data Editor), which is free, solves some of these problems. (I wrote it. It's still evolving but it works already.)

> metadata is hard

Hode lets you encode and search any kind of information -- entities, relationships bewteen entities, relationships between relationships, relationships of any arity (number of members).

Hash, the language in which one adds and searches for data in Hode, is very close to natural language. I'll give examples below, based on the article's author's wishes.

> Let me compare my reading list with another to see overlap

This is the "and" operator. (There are also "or" and "difference" operators.) The query in Hash would look like

  /find (/eval /it #is-in (reading list #of mary))
  & (/eval /it #is-in (reading list #of peter))
> Allow me to tag books instead of placing them into static lists

Hode lets you do even better than tags -- you can classify the meaning of the tag. For instance, here are two commands that would add two tags to a book:

  /add The Wisdom of Crowds #was a best-seller
  /add The Wisdom of Crowds #(helps understand) finance
> Be tied to my highlights, annotations, and bookmarks in a non-proprietary, searchable, and shareable format

Hode is free software, and the data format it uses is dirt-simple.

Hode permits encoding and searching just about anything I can think of. Hode cannot yet create the data for you to search, though -- so far you've got to enter the data yourself.

> Let me query this tool like a relational database. For example: show me all books about scaling startups recommended by people I follow on Twitter or by people they follow.

  /find (/eval /it #(is about) scaling startups)
  & (/eval (/eval I #follow /it #on Twitter) #recommends /it)
> Help me deal with prioritization

Hode lets you order your search results according to any transitive binary relationship -- "read before" or "is more important than" or "was written before", whatever you want.

[1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode

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