Feb 10•7 min read
Curate web content and manage Knowledge for Research
Introduction
Types of content = Web sites, images, video, News, Social Media, manual entry
The tools that I was looking for had to be able to save links (like bookmarks), as a minimum, and have a good way or organizing this info for retrieval. Most of them have a way of assigning multiple tags so that they can be retrieved in various ways. Some of the tools go further and use AI for finding and retrieving the information, highlighting important parts, and even have a social component, so that you can share with other like minded people who may have been researching something similar. Some of these tools (like Glasp) have also started combining search and discovery with the information capture process. Here is a tweet that talks about how curation is related to search:
Apps to save and categorize knowledge
You can use the one built-in to google chrome or other browsers to manage bookmarks, but it doesn’t have good ways of categorizing and searching thru the various links. For example, you can only put them in 1 folder, and it starts to get cumbersome. But this may be sufficient for some people with basic needs.
This one is a little more flexible and you can use multiple tags to categorize and retrieve content. If you need the search feature, you will have to go for the paid premium plan.
This app is pretty good, and pretty easy to use. You can create a bookmark to automatically capture the link of the current page which you can then tag, and access later when you need it. You have various ways to filter the data, and of course you can retrieve it by tag.
This one is the most sophisticated tool of the lot, and really deserves an article on its own. But it does require more learning time to discover all the things that it can do. The more I use it and learn about what it can do, the more I like it. You can highlight any important text from any web site, tag it, and write comments. You can view an AI summary of any web site, if you don’t want to spend a lot of time going thru it. It also supports Youtube transcripts, if the author provided one, which you can highlight and capture. You can even ask it to summarize the video transcript, if you don’t want to watch the whole video. .
It also integrates with Kindle if you want to save your highlights from ebooks There is a social component as well. You can follow other people, and share information. You can search thru all of the glasp content of other users. You can talk with the community including the developers on Slack, give feedback etc. They are very open to suggestions. If that wasn’t enough, they are planning a lot of new features, but I am still exploring the ones that are here, and discovering new things. I also like the “digital me” feature, where it functions as a search thru my highlighted articles.
Here is my knowledge graph:
Here is my profile. You can see that there is a lot of ways to go thru the information, review info from followers, and explore topics you are interested in.
Here is another good article which talks about how they use glasp to Highlight and Take notes on the internet. Here is a summary of the article produced by glasp: “Glasp has revolutionized my workflow when it comes to taking notes and highlighting important information on the internet. Rather than saving articles for later, I can quickly select the text I want to highlight and take notes on it within the browser. This makes it easier to quickly review important information and keep track of my research. Glasp also allows me to organize my notes and highlights into categories, making it easier to find what I need when I need it. Overall, Glasp has been a great tool for me to quickly and easily take notes and highlight important information on the internet”
Discovering content, research
Google is the most common search tool that most people are familiar with. Keep in mind that it was developed decades ago when the web was quite different, and hasn’t really improved much. Their ultimate goal is to present you with tailored ads based on your search history, so that the advertisers can sell you as much product as possible. Most people think that is a good trade-off (if they are even aware) because they are getting free information. The algorithms are private and proprietary, and all the search habits are their property. I won’t go into the consequences here since that really isn’t the main subject of this article. But it isn’t necessarily in their interest to give you the optimal search results. For example, a high paying customer might be ranked higher in the search results.
In a previous post, I talked about how some new and progressive search tools like you.com have started to incorporate AI tools in various ways into the research process with interesting result.
I talked about this one in a previous post, and I am still finding it useful. I like the way that it organizes the search queries into chat, images, videos, news, and social media. I can indicate which sources are most important to me, and I will get the results in that order. The best way to learn about it is to use it. It is not very difficult, and there is a blog, and links to their social media on the main site, as well as a newsletter.
This is definitely worth a separate article so that I can go into more detail, as I discover more uses. It is helpful for research, as well other other things. ChatGPT3 is also incorporated into some of the other more sophisticate tools above like You.com and glasp.co. I find that the “playground” version is the best way to use it, and I have provided a link to the example page above. I definitely believe that this should be part of any good search/discovery tool. This is an interesting article which talks about how we are going back to prompts as the new primary user interface.
This is another interesting article which compares chatgpt to Google for search. Here is the conclusion: “Despite not being optimized for a search experience at all, ChatGPT already matches or slightly beats Google’s performance. Surge AI search engine raters preferred ChatGPT on 42% of queries and Google on 40%”. We are just getting started. What happens when we see GPT4 later this year? I believe that Google is going to have to include their own AI models into their search if they are going to continue to dominate. They have had a monopoly for too long, in my opinion. They are going to have to respond in some way to make their search better. In the mean time, I use a combination of different tools for best results.
Conclusion
I havn’t gone into the various use cases for curating knowledge. In my case it was blogging, but there are many others. I can see people collecting and managing information of projects to invest in for example, or a student collecting information on a topic that they are studying. It helps me to get a better understanding on lots of different topics that I am researching like AI, or Web3 social media.
There are many tools available for curating and managing knowledge on the web. The ones discussed here offer some interesting approaches that can make the process more efficient and productive. They vary in the amount of features and sophistication, so it is important to evaluate the different options and pick the one(s) that work best for your specific needs.
