No Man’s Blog

Really great tools (web applications) are those that allow you enough freedom from the original intention of the developers and therefore can be used by more people for more purposes. The immediate example of course is twitter.

One such gem I recently discovered is Instapaper which meant to facilitate easy reading of long text content. The original purpose of instapaper is simply to save long reads for when you have time to read it. So when a friend passed the link I thought - why do I need another bookmarking tool? I save whatever I need on de.licio.us as well as occasionally on my browser as a Read Later folder. I wasn’t really inclined to use it.

But when I saw the ultra clean and simple interface it immediately reminded me an idea I had in my mind for some time now, called The Wisdom Bin:

A tool/application that will allow you to save words - from a single sentence to few paragraphs. In some ways it aims to be to de.licio.us what Twitter is for blogging (only slightly different). Better example is that it’s like FFFFound for words.

Here how I envisioned it working: You read something on ‘The Internets’ and there’s a line or a paragraph that really resonates for whatever reason - a good thinking, a gag, a quote, data, fine words of any sort - ANYTHING that makes you think, ” i need to write it down / I wish I remember that” and you usually will either save the link to your delicious or just forget about it. The wisdom bin will allow you to highlight the line/paragraph and with a simple right click or a bookmarklet you open a save-box de.licio.us-like and tag what you highlighted (as well as the link to source).

So although this has been done already, none of the tools really gave me the ease and simplicity I had in mind when thinking of the wisdom bin (even clipmarks is too cluttered and shouty for me) until I started using Instapaper. It allows me to highlight anything from a single word to full paragraph and it’s all very very simple and clean that I immediately fell in love.

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