This sounds like it might be close to meeting my use case.
I have bad memory and hence try to write down everything I can. But often throughout a single day/week, I do research on a topic and have a bunch of tabs open that I intend to come back to. Or I read an article that several days later that I cannot recall where I read it at (HN, Twitter, etc.) This usually leads to a frantic search until I can find what I’m looking for as well as having a ton of tabs open.
Manually grouping topics together is too hard. What would be great is a tool that knows where I’ve been, discards bad information (google search result, followed by near immediate close) and some sort of an attempt at topic autoclassficiation (SAP, storage, backup etc.) that gives me the confidence to close tabs knowing that I can get back to a particular topic at a later date.
I've struggled for a while with this kind of overload and ended up with a system that makes it manageable:
1. make is as easy to 'bookmark' stuff as possible -- with a single hotkey
2. make it as easy to search over bookmarks as possible -- also ideally with a single hotkey or as quick as you could do google search
My way of achieving this is using org-mode files for 'bookmarks' [0] and using emacs/ripgrep to search over it [1]. Additional benefit of org-mode is that it's very easy to add notes, priorities, refile bookmarks, so the most interesting stuff propagates through my notes, and I don't feel bad about missing out on information that I don't have time to process because I can always quickly find it when I need.
I'm curious -- Roam Research appears to have won over a lot of folks with this kind of need recently. You didn't list Roam among the prior art -- do you think it's not really relevant? I can certainly see Roam eventually including cross-platform bookmarking/archiving, etc.
By the way, I think you should also take a look at Archive Box, which is very much in this direction: https://archivebox.io/
You mean, I didn't include it as prior art for Promnesia or Grasp project?
For Promnesia, the goals of Roam and Promnesia are pretty different at the moment (although Roam data can be used with Promnesia, as I mentioned). In addition, I can't personally bet on a closed source tool.
For Grasp, simply because Roam wasn't known (or possibly didn't even exist!) when I wrote it. But even now that I tried Roam now, I don't think I can go back from using plaintext files, it's just so much snappier and more hackable.
Thanks, I used archivebox! Still need to set up a proper automatic archiving, and integration Promnesia with personal web archives is also in my plans!
But why bookmarks? I recognize that ultimately they are ephemeral. At some point in the next few years I'll get really drunk and just delete them all and be left with the useful bookmarks. I can't go back to bookmark overload... For the really important things, I use Zotero.
I have bad memory and hence try to write down everything I can. But often throughout a single day/week, I do research on a topic and have a bunch of tabs open that I intend to come back to. Or I read an article that several days later that I cannot recall where I read it at (HN, Twitter, etc.) This usually leads to a frantic search until I can find what I’m looking for as well as having a ton of tabs open.
Manually grouping topics together is too hard. What would be great is a tool that knows where I’ve been, discards bad information (google search result, followed by near immediate close) and some sort of an attempt at topic autoclassficiation (SAP, storage, backup etc.) that gives me the confidence to close tabs knowing that I can get back to a particular topic at a later date.