Ask HN: Organizing value taken from online articles/blogs | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Organizing value taken from online articles/blogs

6 pointsrobryan7 comments

If you’re anything like me from day to day you probably take in a lot of articles online, these can be anything from current events or fluff pieces to articles which change the way you approach things forever. At the moment there is very little that I keep as a permanent record from what I am taking in online, so nothing except the key articles are really integrated into my thinking, with the rest only being recalled when a cue is given in conversation.

What I’m thinking about is an extension to how instapaper works that after each thing you read you decide if you got any lasting value from it. Something where you are forced (as long as you follow the system) to write a summary on your key takeaways and categorise the article. As in many areas this act of summarising and categorising is a good way to embed what you have learnt in memory, as well as have a reference to refer back to in future.

Really I don’t know if I’d be disciplined enough to follow such a system so I guess I’m just wondering is there anything out there that people use to do this and just throwing the concept out in general. Also this is inspired by the ycombinator startup OhLife which by sending you daily emails assists in staying disciplined in keeping a diary.

I've always wanted a system like this, but I've never been disciplined enough to setup and consistently follow such a system, like you say.

I've thought about wikis, and taking notes of things I read, but those things take too much effort to do. At the moment, I'm searching my Google Reader items and using http://historio.us to catalog articles that I read and think are valuable. It works well because it takes just one click to add an article, but I don't always remember to add what I read.

A few thoughts about what I would want for a system like this:

* It needs to find a balance between in-your-face and hidden away. It needs to be displayed prominently enough, that I remember to rate and review it, but it should not get in the way of what I want to read.

* It should have a rating system of some kind. Maybe on a scale of boring to interesting to changed my life forever.

* It should be in plain text, or able to be exported into plain text. Maybe make it YAML formatted as well. That way, if I want to run an analysis to see which domains have the highest-rated articles, or search them for a certain keyword, I can.

* It should support tags and categories so that I can somewhat organize them.

* Add a field for a summary (and allow me to decide whether I want to require a summary or not). That way, I end up with a very useful annotated bibliography that I can reference to later. I could determine what the key points of the article were without having to re-read it.

I guess to something like this could be leveraged to provide a much better "what should I read?" aspect because people have curated it in a way to indicate what is really valuable under different tags.

Of course you would want public/private, people wanting to use it purely for their own benefit can choose to stay private and not have their interactions aggregated.

I've been doing this for the last eight years with pencil, paper, filing cabinets, and archive-boxes. It's reliable, flexible, and easy.

However, it's not sustainable in the long run. I currently have five filing cabinets of notes and around a dozen boxes. Most of my colleagues have been at this longer. Their offices (at home and work) are crammed with cardboard boxes and cabinets of well-organized notes.

I'd love a technical solution, but I haven't found anything that works for me.

Just a cursory thought: I think this sort of task has more to do with diligence than an easy-to-use tool.

Much like to-do lists, it's easy to just keep adding items and categorizing them in separate lists and setting dates and reminders and being sent an SMS... Or you could just put the item on your calendar and do it.

Getting back to your idea, I used to do exactly this with Delicious. But after so long I got tired of writing notes for everything I read; I realize now this is because I began consuming too much every day. To me, burnout seems to be the biggest problem with these types of tools. But, again, that goes back to people's habits and just "getting it done."

This is not an answer, just some thoughts (which are not entirely well-thought-out). Take them with a grain of salt.

I use a FF extension called Scrapbook Plus and set its store to be on Dropbox, meaning it syncs with any computer I move to. Works a treat.

One key advantage of this: the data is on my hard disks and it really uses Dropbox only to sync. If Dropbox ever goes out of business, I still keep the data. If I were using Delicious or whatnot, I'd have to figure out backups separately.

I used to save all my favorite links in delicious before but recently moved to historio.us.

Evernote works for me.

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