INDEX // mb Ideas on Publishing Books in Canada (and other attempts to write good)

The Internet Version of Being Unable to Find Your Keys

On Exhaling | 24 October 2009 with 2 comments

I have a bad memory. I wish there was a web app that would track my content consumption and make it searchable after the fact. In a few cases recently I have read or seen something on the net that wasn’t important enough to bookmark at the time, but that I wanted to find afterward and couldn’t remember where it was. My browser history was no help. Google search was no help. Twitter search was no help. My GReader wasn’t either. Frankly I couldn’t even remember the context in which the content arrived in front of me. Was it something I clicked on in twitter? I couldn’t remember.

The marketing copy for the Instapaper calls it a holding area for potential bookmarks. The app I want is a holding area for bookmarks I failed to see the potential of. It would be a collection of things, not to read, but of things read. No tagging. No saving. Simply trace my information discovery path in a retrievable way. Does anyone else have this problem? How do you handle it?


2 Comments

I share your pain, Mark. This fall, I’ve redoubled my efforts to use Delicious, and to tag the hell out of things. But it doesn’t really cover the stuff that you look at, say ‘Meh,’ and then wish you’d kept it when the idea comes around again in a new light a week later.

BTW, I use Instapaper, but I don’t think it helps with this at all; I really like it for reading web content on my iPod/Phone. Strips out the formatting and gives you a nice e-reader kind of view. I read stuff that way all the time.

Posted by John Maxwell on 25 October 2009 @ 10pm

While it doesn’t catch everything, I use Google Reader’s search of ‘read items’ for this.

Most of what I read now comes from my RSS feeds and I find a combination of Google/Delicious catches almost everything.

Though a few months ago I had the same problem trying to direct a friend to a study online that seems to have vanished.

Posted by Ashleigh on 26 October 2009 @ 6am

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