4 ms·

My monthly opportunity to put out the idea that bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links). I've written a lot about this, and I got

by bsnnkv 2y ago

My monthly opportunity to put out the idea that bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links). I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[1] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[2], and I have never looked back to browser bookmarks or services like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readwise etc. which are built around bookmarking metadata instead of content. It's amazing once you get the mental model, and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends. My favourite part of this mindset switch is that it makes bookmarking user generated content[3] both sane and easy, and automatically enriching those bookmarks with additional metadata a breeze. [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wrong-for-highlighting/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr... [2]: https://notado.app https://notado.app [3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/best-of-hacker-news-comments/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/best-of-hacker-news-comments/

novoreorx 2y ago
Interesting product! What if I save different selection of an article for multiple times, are they going to be merged in a same entry, or created separatedly?
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  They are saved as separate entities (also tagged separately if you have any automated tagging rules set up which trigger for them), and they can be viewed grouped together in the context of their source article in the "Library" tab.
  - novoreorx 2y ago
    Hmm, in this case, Notado is more like a note-taking system than a bookmarking system. Highlights are just notes that connected with a link. Reminds me of https://lazy.so/ https://lazy.so/, it has a very similar workflow [^1], and the notes of a same link are naturally aggregated as links are entities connect with notes. [1]: https://www.loom.com/share/c56e982f86cc42ef93be31c92570c5ce?t=275 https://www.loom.com/share/c56e982f86cc42ef93be31c92570c5ce?...
PaulKeeble 2y ago
There is also a self hosted solution called Wallabag https://wallabag.org/ https://wallabag.org/ Same concept its about archiving rather than just the link, given how quickly links often die its often what you want depending on why you bookmarked it.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  > Same concept Unfortunately it looks like Wallabag has the same fundamental issue of treating links as primary entities and scraped content as additional metadata that I described in the first article linked in the parent comment. Especially when it comes to long form articles which cover multiple topics or are by their nature inter-disciplinary, it is essential for highlights or slices of content to exist independently of their source, while retaining their source as metadata, and allowing them to be linked independently (via tags, collections, feeds, titles etc.) to other slices of content (ie. commentary on the same article). Archiving is an important step forward though, especially for a self-hosted solution, and especially after so many people have been burned by Pinboard's failure to deliver on its archiving promises for a paid product. I ultimately took a different approach to this and instead of maintaining my own scraping/archiving product, built an integration with the Wayback Machine[1]. [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/
deafpolygon 2y ago
The internet changes too much, that bookmarking for content is sometimes a futile effort. And even then, a browser like Firefox lets you tag liberally, if that's your thing.
JohnFen 2y ago
I don't know... when I bookmark a page, it's because I want to get back to that exact, specific page in the future.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  ... which is what happens when you click either the link to the source which is stored as metadata or the link to the automatically archived website copy.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Well, of course. I was responding to this: > bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links) Perhaps I'm not understanding exactly what "centered around" means, but to my ears, that statement sounds like it would not be an improvement for my particular use case. Not saying the idea is a bad one at all -- just saying it doesn't sound appealing to me personally. But I also suspect I may not really be understanding it.
    - ghusbands 2y ago
      Bookmarks become outdated or the pages may be updated to no longer have the text you are interested in. If you're bookmarking a page that's fairly static, you're probably more interested in the content than the URL.
- j45 2y ago
  Do you mean you want to go to back to the exact specific sentence(s) on the page you remember reading?
eduction 2y ago
You advocate what you call a “content first approach” but that’s not what your solution is. It is a text first approach. Text is one kind of content. There are many more.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  I have built similarly informed systems for bookmarking video and audio content; my system for text is the only one that is publicly available for others to use.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > my system for text is the only one that is publicly available for others to use. Why? (Not that I'm probably a prospective customer for any of them; just curiosity as to what makes the difference.)
dh1011 2y ago
I completely agree that bookmarks should prioritize content over metadata. This is actually what led me to develop the "semantic-bookmark-manager" [1]. It uses LLM to summarize the content of bookmarked pages and generate relevant tags. Additionally, it utilizes RAG to facilitate semantic searching within your bookmarks. [1] https://github.com/dh1011/semantic-bookmark-manager https://github.com/dh1011/semantic-bookmark-manager
Shog9 2y ago
Interesting. My first thought was of Google Notebook, a service that died well over a decade ago and I still remember only because I used it to bookmark recipes. Online recipe sites tend to either be horrible ad-clogged messes, have unreliable URLs (or hosts), or both. Notebook let me select the text of a recipe (ingredients and instructions) and save that along with the URL, something I made frequent use of during its life. Since Notebook died, I... Print recipes. On paper. Which also hosts the content, annotates with the URL, and allows me to easily take notes. And also doesn't cost me much if I spill things on it. But there are certain downsides as well.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links). Also known as my 500-ish tabs in a single window. Yes, there are multiple windows.
kristopolous 2y ago
How's this pitch style on your landing page working out for you? It's breaking most of the conventional rules. Are you seeing customer adoption? I'm always interested in learning new methods of communicating ideas.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  I’ve got the tab open and am strongly considering buying a subscription to see what it’s about, so it (and the low price) is working on me
- golergka 2y ago
  It reads like a good documentation and not a sales pitch, which helps a lot. Also, the design is great too, looking almost as simple and beautiful as c2.com. Both of these give off "made by an engineer for engineers" vibes.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  Honestly, adoption isn't amazing (ie. not at Raindrop or Readwise levels which I guess is the bar these days in this product area), but I have more than enough subscribers to pay for all the hosting costs. To be completely honest, even if I didn't have a single paying subscriber I would still happily pay to host it out of pocket (and for a long time, I did) because it is the perfect tool for my own needs and it is so deeply integrated into all written knowledge consumption in my life[1] - I will use it until the day I die (and then my wife will open source it). [1]: I use it to save comments from HN, Reddit, Twitter etc., I use it to save highlights from web articles, I use it to save/import my Kindle highlights, I use it to highlight parts of newsletters in my email inbox - the list is endless
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    You'd probably multiply those numbers substantially with a little rearrangement of the content. Even the pricing is weird. $1.99/month billed annually... Just say $25/year - if people have bought in on the value proposition here they aren't going to run away scared when you hide $23.88 as $1.99. Also that sentence is backwards. I stopped reading after seeing the price under the false assumption that I need to pay to try the product. Instead "First month Free No CC required. If you love it, $25 per year thereafter. And if it's not for you, no problem, thanks anyways!" As an aphorism: Free is more fun than fee. You want the fee with the fun of free.
golergka 2y ago
Why is there a setting to import all comments from HN, but not all posts?
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  The setting is to import favorite comments - the "favorite submissions" page is just a bunch of links, whereas the "favorite comments" page has the actual content that can be imported. It would be nice if text submissions that are favorited by a user could also be exposed in the latter.
itohihiyt 2y ago
I use Zotero for what you're talking about. It saves a dated copy of the site, the link, has the ability to tag and add notes. Offline first too.
pryelluw 2y ago
The goal is instead to copy the content over and link back to the source? I’m a little lost sorry. This seems very interesting and similar to a zettelkasten system.
dchuk 2y ago
You desperately need to show your product on your landing page, and have headings that convey the individual use cases and value props of it for the reader. Simple general rule of digital marketing: No one reads website copy. They look at pictures and scan headings. Another simple rule: I inherently don’t care about your product if I’m reading your site for the first time, so don’t spend time describing your capabilities. Simply describe how my life will be better if I use your product, and show me the product doing those things. Less words more pictures. Less words more value. (Sorry for being blunt, just trying to help with your conversions)
- adiabatty 2y ago
  I second this, especially the part about adding headings. Also, the line length (in characters) is crazy long. You ought to constrain the width of your text by putting it in columns or blocks, because you're trying to sell me something and I'm too lazy to resize my browser window just to get a not-unpleasant reading experience. I'd do this for https://danluu.com https://danluu.com, but not yours yet.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  Thanks for this detailed feedback. Another user somewhere else down this comment thread gave similar feedback and I think together it's enough for me to throw together some alternative landing page layouts. Funnily enough I apply some of these things in a different context to READMEs for my popular GitHub projects[1], but whenever I see them applied on a product page I often click away very quickly because I associate with snake oil (it wouldn't surprise me that I'm in the minority here). [1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    Well one more piece of advice for you, then: Don't use an orange square for your webpage icon, I get it mixed up with all my open HN tabs! Ha ha only se...mi-kidding, quarter-serious.
asjir 2y ago
It's good, I built something that works similarly but with a very different UI [0]: https://farosaves.com https://farosaves.com
- josephernest 2y ago
  Have you worked on the paid vesion yet? (10$ after 1000 saves) I've built a few browser extensions, but not found a super simple way to monetize them. Which technical solution do you plan to use for a paid version of your extension? Authentication? Other?
- aspect0545 2y ago
  Could you create a Firefox plugin? Then I’d love to test it
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  This is good stuff! I hope you keep working on this.
Modified3019 2y ago
Thanks for posting, this might be what I’ve been looking for.
savolai 2y ago
Fyi: kul*i is a swearword in finnish, means ’dick’. Dickish may not be the best starting point for social media service.
- vonunov 2y ago
  Yet somehow I feel like if the Finns had made a social media service and named it that, it would be considered the height of hilarity and Finnishness
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  I've heard this one before. Good thing that there are far more Persian and Arabic speakers in the world :)

by bsnnkv 2y ago

novoreorx 2y ago

Interesting product! What if I save different selection of an article for multiple times, are they going to be merged in a same entry, or created separatedly?

bsnnkv 2y ago
They are saved as separate entities (also tagged separately if you have any automated tagging rules set up which trigger for them), and they can be viewed grouped together in the context of their source article in the "Library" tab.
- novoreorx 2y ago
  Hmm, in this case, Notado is more like a note-taking system than a bookmarking system. Highlights are just notes that connected with a link. Reminds me of https://lazy.so/ https://lazy.so/, it has a very similar workflow [^1], and the notes of a same link are naturally aggregated as links are entities connect with notes. [1]: https://www.loom.com/share/c56e982f86cc42ef93be31c92570c5ce?t=275 https://www.loom.com/share/c56e982f86cc42ef93be31c92570c5ce?...

PaulKeeble 2y ago

There is also a self hosted solution called Wallabag https://wallabag.org/ https://wallabag.org/ Same concept its about archiving rather than just the link, given how quickly links often die its often what you want depending on why you bookmarked it.

bsnnkv 2y ago
> Same concept Unfortunately it looks like Wallabag has the same fundamental issue of treating links as primary entities and scraped content as additional metadata that I described in the first article linked in the parent comment. Especially when it comes to long form articles which cover multiple topics or are by their nature inter-disciplinary, it is essential for highlights or slices of content to exist independently of their source, while retaining their source as metadata, and allowing them to be linked independently (via tags, collections, feeds, titles etc.) to other slices of content (ie. commentary on the same article). Archiving is an important step forward though, especially for a self-hosted solution, and especially after so many people have been burned by Pinboard's failure to deliver on its archiving promises for a paid product. I ultimately took a different approach to this and instead of maintaining my own scraping/archiving product, built an integration with the Wayback Machine[1]. [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/

deafpolygon 2y ago

The internet changes too much, that bookmarking for content is sometimes a futile effort. And even then, a browser like Firefox lets you tag liberally, if that's your thing.

JohnFen 2y ago

I don't know... when I bookmark a page, it's because I want to get back to that exact, specific page in the future.

bsnnkv 2y ago
... which is what happens when you click either the link to the source which is stored as metadata or the link to the automatically archived website copy.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Well, of course. I was responding to this: > bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links) Perhaps I'm not understanding exactly what "centered around" means, but to my ears, that statement sounds like it would not be an improvement for my particular use case. Not saying the idea is a bad one at all -- just saying it doesn't sound appealing to me personally. But I also suspect I may not really be understanding it.
  - ghusbands 2y ago
    Bookmarks become outdated or the pages may be updated to no longer have the text you are interested in. If you're bookmarking a page that's fairly static, you're probably more interested in the content than the URL.
j45 2y ago
Do you mean you want to go to back to the exact specific sentence(s) on the page you remember reading?

eduction 2y ago

You advocate what you call a “content first approach” but that’s not what your solution is. It is a text first approach. Text is one kind of content. There are many more.

bsnnkv 2y ago
I have built similarly informed systems for bookmarking video and audio content; my system for text is the only one that is publicly available for others to use.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > my system for text is the only one that is publicly available for others to use. Why? (Not that I'm probably a prospective customer for any of them; just curiosity as to what makes the difference.)

dh1011 2y ago

I completely agree that bookmarks should prioritize content over metadata. This is actually what led me to develop the "semantic-bookmark-manager" [1]. It uses LLM to summarize the content of bookmarked pages and generate relevant tags. Additionally, it utilizes RAG to facilitate semantic searching within your bookmarks. [1] https://github.com/dh1011/semantic-bookmark-manager https://github.com/dh1011/semantic-bookmark-manager

Shog9 2y ago

Interesting. My first thought was of Google Notebook, a service that died well over a decade ago and I still remember only because I used it to bookmark recipes. Online recipe sites tend to either be horrible ad-clogged messes, have unreliable URLs (or hosts), or both. Notebook let me select the text of a recipe (ingredients and instructions) and save that along with the URL, something I made frequent use of during its life. Since Notebook died, I... Print recipes. On paper. Which also hosts the content, annotates with the URL, and allows me to easily take notes. And also doesn't cost me much if I spill things on it. But there are certain downsides as well.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links). Also known as my 500-ish tabs in a single window. Yes, there are multiple windows.

kristopolous 2y ago

How's this pitch style on your landing page working out for you? It's breaking most of the conventional rules. Are you seeing customer adoption? I'm always interested in learning new methods of communicating ideas.

mplanchard 2y ago
I’ve got the tab open and am strongly considering buying a subscription to see what it’s about, so it (and the low price) is working on me
golergka 2y ago
It reads like a good documentation and not a sales pitch, which helps a lot. Also, the design is great too, looking almost as simple and beautiful as c2.com. Both of these give off "made by an engineer for engineers" vibes.
bsnnkv 2y ago
Honestly, adoption isn't amazing (ie. not at Raindrop or Readwise levels which I guess is the bar these days in this product area), but I have more than enough subscribers to pay for all the hosting costs. To be completely honest, even if I didn't have a single paying subscriber I would still happily pay to host it out of pocket (and for a long time, I did) because it is the perfect tool for my own needs and it is so deeply integrated into all written knowledge consumption in my life[1] - I will use it until the day I die (and then my wife will open source it). [1]: I use it to save comments from HN, Reddit, Twitter etc., I use it to save highlights from web articles, I use it to save/import my Kindle highlights, I use it to highlight parts of newsletters in my email inbox - the list is endless
- kristopolous 2y ago
  You'd probably multiply those numbers substantially with a little rearrangement of the content. Even the pricing is weird. $1.99/month billed annually... Just say $25/year - if people have bought in on the value proposition here they aren't going to run away scared when you hide $23.88 as $1.99. Also that sentence is backwards. I stopped reading after seeing the price under the false assumption that I need to pay to try the product. Instead "First month Free No CC required. If you love it, $25 per year thereafter. And if it's not for you, no problem, thanks anyways!" As an aphorism: Free is more fun than fee. You want the fee with the fun of free.

golergka 2y ago

Why is there a setting to import all comments from HN, but not all posts?

bsnnkv 2y ago
The setting is to import favorite comments - the "favorite submissions" page is just a bunch of links, whereas the "favorite comments" page has the actual content that can be imported. It would be nice if text submissions that are favorited by a user could also be exposed in the latter.

itohihiyt 2y ago

I use Zotero for what you're talking about. It saves a dated copy of the site, the link, has the ability to tag and add notes. Offline first too.

pryelluw 2y ago

The goal is instead to copy the content over and link back to the source? I’m a little lost sorry. This seems very interesting and similar to a zettelkasten system.

dchuk 2y ago

You desperately need to show your product on your landing page, and have headings that convey the individual use cases and value props of it for the reader. Simple general rule of digital marketing: No one reads website copy. They look at pictures and scan headings. Another simple rule: I inherently don’t care about your product if I’m reading your site for the first time, so don’t spend time describing your capabilities. Simply describe how my life will be better if I use your product, and show me the product doing those things. Less words more pictures. Less words more value. (Sorry for being blunt, just trying to help with your conversions)

adiabatty 2y ago
I second this, especially the part about adding headings. Also, the line length (in characters) is crazy long. You ought to constrain the width of your text by putting it in columns or blocks, because you're trying to sell me something and I'm too lazy to resize my browser window just to get a not-unpleasant reading experience. I'd do this for https://danluu.com https://danluu.com, but not yours yet.
bsnnkv 2y ago
Thanks for this detailed feedback. Another user somewhere else down this comment thread gave similar feedback and I think together it's enough for me to throw together some alternative landing page layouts. Funnily enough I apply some of these things in a different context to READMEs for my popular GitHub projects[1], but whenever I see them applied on a product page I often click away very quickly because I associate with snake oil (it wouldn't surprise me that I'm in the minority here). [1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Well one more piece of advice for you, then: Don't use an orange square for your webpage icon, I get it mixed up with all my open HN tabs! Ha ha only se...mi-kidding, quarter-serious.

asjir 2y ago

It's good, I built something that works similarly but with a very different UI [0]: https://farosaves.com https://farosaves.com

josephernest 2y ago
Have you worked on the paid vesion yet? (10$ after 1000 saves) I've built a few browser extensions, but not found a super simple way to monetize them. Which technical solution do you plan to use for a paid version of your extension? Authentication? Other?
aspect0545 2y ago
Could you create a Firefox plugin? Then I’d love to test it
bsnnkv 2y ago
This is good stuff! I hope you keep working on this.

Modified3019 2y ago

Thanks for posting, this might be what I’ve been looking for.

savolai 2y ago

Fyi: kul*i is a swearword in finnish, means ’dick’. Dickish may not be the best starting point for social media service.

vonunov 2y ago
Yet somehow I feel like if the Finns had made a social media service and named it that, it would be considered the height of hilarity and Finnishness
bsnnkv 2y ago
I've heard this one before. Good thing that there are far more Persian and Arabic speakers in the world :)