Where to begin? Probably the most common problem I see myself and other people dealing with is processing the incoming deluge of articles to read and videos to watch. This isn’t all personal recommendations - it encompasses any and all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming. A list of issues, roughly by order of appearance:
Content is published in a variety of formats including but not limited to images, sound files, videos, Google Drive docs, diagrams, long-from paywalled articles, PDFs, powerpoint presentations, and base 64 encoded blobs.
I would like to batch process content in different “streams” regardless of where they are stored. For example: I have two hours, let me work through interesting text content my friends sent me last week. Or: show me all the interesting/relevant videos I’ve queued over the past month.
A universal book log, recommendation & sharing system #
Part of the problem here is metadata is hard. Someone has to sit there and fill out the author, title, subtitle, summary, page count - and they’re probably not going to do it for free. Amazon is a good at it but is hostile to publishers. Goodreads has much potential but seems to have stagnated. Linking to the book’s Wikipedia entry would be my preference but very few books have an entry.
Intelligent PDF viewers, eBook readers, audiobook & podcast players #
A centralized search interface for my digital brain (memex)