One of my regularly recurring hyperfocus subjects is how to collect digital things from the web. While I don’t do much structured research, I often do unstructured research. I tend to do this in two ways:

• basically surfing the web and collecting bits and ideas
• going down the rabbit hole on a specific topic, trying to find information or details (this often involves comparing things as well)

I have a tendency to want to collect, organize and archive the things I find: interesting websites, personal blogs, articles, notes, ideas, products, tools, ways of making a zine, all sorts of random things, depending on the topic I’m hyperfocused on at the time. How to do this collecting and organizing and archiving is itself a frequent subject of my hyperfocus.

I tend to want to collect various types of things - articles, guides, scraps of ideas, quotes, images, personal websites of random people, things I see in the real world, my own thoughts and ideas, references, manuals, websites of tools and apps, PDFs, etc. I also want to collect things around a variety of topics - technology, website making, programming, note taking, zine making, photography, writing, ideas for creative projects, lifestyle dreams, methodologies for thinking, philosophies, taxonomies, etc. These are all digital artifacts, most originating on someone else’s website or as a social media post (these have an URL) and some originating with me (these are image files or text, sometimes even audio recordings).

My problem is twofold: what tool to use to collect these things and how to organize/structure my collection.

Some of my requirements for my ideal collecting/curating/archiving setup:

• cross platform - at minimum available on iPhone, iPad plus a Mac and/or web interface
• quick and easy to add to from any platform
• easy to organize in folders/collections
• good previews - both for links and files/text, so I don’t always have to click through to see the content I’ve saved
• stable sync between platforms
• easy to export in a universal format - something like plain text, webloc, etc. so I can move things out of the system easily. Ideally should already store things in an open format.
• stable, fast apps - modern apps with a UI that is easy to use and fast to load/operate
• longevity - something that I can trust to be around for at minimum 10 years, ideally more. Either open source, based on an open format or a company with a long track record and a stable long term business model. Big tech is not an option.
• very cheap or free - no more than $5/month, ideally less or free
• link archiving - ideally should be able to archive a current snapshot of the links I save and store the files, text I add as well

Things I’ve tried so far and why they aren’t ideal:

• Safari bookmarks - cumbersome to organize, only stores links, no good previews
• Are.na - slow, buggy iOS app and web interface, cumbersome to organize, plus $7/month is a bit over my budget
• Anybox, Raindrop.io, other Apple-based bookmark apps - mainly just links, usually paid, not open format based, doesn’t feel like I can trust them to be around
• self hosted bookmarking (eg. Shaare) - links only, cumbersome interfaces, usually web only
• Pinboard - links only, single person business doesn’t feel safe in terms of bus factor
• Notes apps (eg. Apple Notes, Bear, etc.) - links are not first class citizens

So I keep searching for the perfect tool. I’m afraid, that I’ll need to make a compromise somewhere, but I still hope there is something out there for this that I can confidently use.

Well, anyways.