I have two problems with good content on the web. ☝️Number 1, I always have a ton of tabs open and even more newsletters that I keep signing up for. They all have plenty of quality information that I wish I was be able to read, remember and retrieve whenever I need it. ✌️Number 2, is finding the time. While I am yet to discover something that dilates time, I’ve come across plenty of old and new technologies to help me solve the first problem and facilitate this “web to brain” process.
At the very basic level, you’ve got 🔖bookmarking tools that are increasingly better at enabling you to categorize the pages you read or find, and retrieve them when you need them. Papaly used to be really good, and I hear raindrop is the more popular choice right now. Both have brilliant designs to help with saving and retrieval. But that isn’t enough for someone who is trying to learn a thing or two from all this information.
A step further than bookmarking and classifying pages, is 📝annotating their content and adding your own notes. Diigo, hypothes.is, PowerNotes and RevNote are among the first to develop these features, all of them focusing on students and researchers that are going through incredible amounts of text to learn or write. PowerNotes is pretty great especially for students and lecturers because it’s free for the end users, but institutions can purchase shared access.
Mindstone, a UK-based startup, is a new entrant in this space having launched in 2020 and still in beta. It managed to raise 💰$2.2M this year and recently started a crowdfunding campaign, already beating the £600k targed with more than a week left. Mindstone does things differently: it’s not a plugin, you send any media to the app, where all the annotation and organization happens. Beyond that, the app focuses on improving retention, so it added courseware-type features like flashcards and collaborative annotation.
While all of these tools can be useful, they aren’t effective in and of themselves. Technology can be a means, but you need a system, and if you have a good system to manage your online brain🧠, then any combination of technologies can work (!!!)
The best system I could find is 🗃zettlekasten, where you create short notes that represent a single idea, stack them in a specific way and link them among each other (for more details read Sonke Ahrens’ book). The zettlekasten method was developed by sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), who published more than 200 books and 600 research articles 😅😅.
He was obviously reading physical books 📚, but a number of apps recently adopted his ideas to facilitate prolific online reading and writing: Roam, RemNote, Notion, Obsidian, Hypernotes. You can do it with any other note-taking app: bear, coda, evernote.
I personally use a combination of the open-source Joplin and Hypernotes from Zenkit. The beautiful thing about Hypernotes (almost like the knowledge networks in obsidian) is the visual graph that it builds from the links you create, a literal second brain.
Roam and RemNote are among favorites for zettlekasten, and sounds like the easiest ones to get started with. Roam raised $9M last year, and RemNote raised $3 million in September.
This went over my head: Notion raised $275 million in October (🤑 $343M in total 🤑). Beyond growing in popularity with the backlinking features and all the zettlekasten followers, Notion grew at least five times during lockdowns and due to some tik-tok fame. It also strategically acquired automate.io, a zapier/ifttt alternative that will let you integrate and build workflows from and to Notion. Giant Microsoft was feeling threatened, and to compete with all these knowledge worker productivity tools, it launched Loop last week.
Categorizing bookmarks, or annotating pages is clearly not enough. Note-taking apps are launching plugins that can clip content. But none of them are automating much of the “web to brain” process. 🙌 That is why I have really high hopes for 📖Readocracy. Readocracy tracks what you are reading and automatically builds your information diet. You still have to do the annotation and note-taking for any ideas that you will have (and right now I do a lot of it using other applications), but the tool has potential because it already tells me that I might be reading too much news, and nudges me about the bias of the sources I’ve been engaging with.
In other news:
🎓Best universities in 2022, no surprise there: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley; and Oxford for arts and humanities.
🍭Educause was back in person this year.
🏦No week passes without a corporate upskilling app closing a funding round. This time, it’s one that delivers live and coaching-led sessions for leaders. Hone raised $16M.
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