Succinct references

...the saving of succinct references transforms sharing and searching from simple content-matching tasks to rich, context-driven processes. Yet, despite its fundamental role in our digital lives, something as simple as saving is not a solved problem. There's little consensus on what gets saved, how

Resonant curation

What makes it most likely to resonate is that it comes from a peer, signals an outlay of effort, builds on an existing relationship, aligns with the recipient's interests, respects the recipient's preferences, is easily evaluable, is part of a larger, high quality sequence, and doesn't demand recipr

Anti-audience

To be anti-audience is to deny that audiences are a first principle of digital culture at all. To be anti-audience is to refute the idea that the monopolisation of the many's attention by the few is a precondition of "winning". It is to acknowledge an organic upper bound on one's reach and influence

Sharing patterns

Sharing is a foundational behaviour in modern culture, with hidden patterns and subtle dynamics that are only now revealing themselves after a generation of being online. Contemporary sharing tends to be cross-platform, depth-limited, informal and P2P in nature, and multi-threaded.

The missing operating system primitives

The alternative—the thing we're pushing for—is to convert saving, sharing and search into core, foundational capabilities that are accessible to all. Saving should be simple. Sharing should be protocolised and pattern-based. Searching should be specific to the end user's context. Saving, sharing and

RAG-tagging and sem-zooming

RAG-tagging, in contrast, continually regenerates the tags applied to items in a schema that accounts for historical tagging and the needs of the present moment. Semantic zooming (sem-zooming) complements RAG-tagging. Humans have a supposed memory span of seven things (plus or minus two). Sem-zoomin

Tools for third places

...we can define "tools for third places" as things that deepen and enrich both synchronous and asynchronous peer-to-peer interactions. Their core operations are the saving, sharing and searching of things we find, for a whole range of reasons, most interesting and arresting.

Relationships and progress

"A new way to save, share and search" is about more than mere technological innovation. It's about the base fabric of our relationships and the texture of the emerging reality that unfolds from them over time. Like the civilisational progress indicators that lag behind information allocation practic

Representing search spaces

...we're still in the earliest generations of search space representation. We're still bound to 2D digital interfaces constrained by rectangular glass planes; alternatives are difficult to conceive, prototype, bring to market, and scale to consumer-level adoption. A sustainable shift forward from ou

Start with a log

In essence, a log reflects the unfolding of a reality. Because of this simplicity, it demands minimal changes to existing behaviour. Change is hard, and a log requires just a bit of extra attention at the time of the event, plus a small effort to capture context afterward. Its marginal cost is not m