Check Your Pulse #55

In short, the architecture of digital platforms has made us obsessive documenters and consumers of the present, yet largely indifferent to the archives we create.

But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content – “what should I read?” – and not enough on the structure – “how do we collect, store, and contextualize the information we consume?” We seem to have forgotten that the goal is not to consume more information. The goal is to think better, so we can achieve our goal... See more

Love this from Jesse Beyroutey : We’ve found that the primary source for a company’s dominance is whether it designs its product and business model to be perfectly aligned with its customers’ interests. A great test of alignment is whether the company benefits or suffers from increased transparency.

the goal is not to consume more information. The goal is to think better, so we can achieve our goals.

The architecture of digital platforms encourage us to consume information because it’s in front of us, not because it’s relevant. On Twitter, nothing has to be remembered, studied, applied, or reflected on. It’s an environment that promotes distracted thinking and superficial learning.

The potential to build community-curated knowledge networks remains largely untapped. There are reasons to be optimistic; the economic feasibility of paid communities, a renewed interest in curation, a slow move away from big social, and an improved understanding of platform incentives. All combined, this will lead to communities that are more sust... See more

The past few years have seen the rise of many knowledge management tools, online communities, and curation businesses. But what’s interesting is how these categories are remixing into new combinations of content, community, and software.

The Internet offers us the first major opportunity to introduce new, digitally-native information architectures that improve our understanding of the world through added context and relation.

The human brain is incredible at uncovering meaning, but is deficient at long-term memory storage. If we forget what we read, we can’t apply the knowledge to the problem at hand. We don’t need to read a long write-up on Figma’s winning strategy on a Wednesday at 11am when it hits our inbox, but we should be able to reference it if we’re building a ... See more