February 2nd, 2008 by David Weinberger
I’ve been playing with Instapaper.com a little, and liking it a lot.
It’s a free site built by Marco Arment, who works at Tumblr (if I’m reading this right). You put the Instapaper “Read Later” button in your button bar, and click it if you’re on a site you want to read later. Go to Instapaper.com and you’ll see a list of what you’ve clicked. Simplicity itself.
There seems to be just one more feature: Any text you’ve selected on the page your instapapering is taken as that page’s description.
That takes care of my temporary bookmarking needs, a feature I’ve wanted for a while. But I wonder what would happen if my instapaper page were public and pointable. Could we start to use instapaper to build a collaborative newspaper that pulls together the recommended reading of people you respect?
David, I have been adding the tag “pending” to pages/restaurants that I wanted to read/check out – then when I finally visit it, I remove the tag and capture my new thoughts. I will have to look at this approach to see if it fills a gap.
P.S. I came into the “Tupointo” world as a result of reading “The Wiki and the Blog – Towards a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community“. Your book was a very complementary framework…thanks.
P.S.S – The Tupointo word came from reading danah boyd’s blog http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/01/28/the_absurdities.html
David, I whipped-up an AppleScript so you can post NetNewsWire headlines you wish to read later directly to instapaper. I’m finding instapaper quite useful as I move between locations/Macs.
http://nuspi.blogspot.com/2008/02/post-to-instapaper-applescript.html
Looks interesting, but I’m not sure how it adds/compliments/replaces Del.icio.us.
I can already bundle items as Pending, as Ron Mecredy does, and the advantage of Del.icio.us is that by changing the tag, it’s then saved for all time.
Plus looking at my network on there gives the same effect as a paper created by the recommended links of my friends…
But anything that allows me to remove any dependence on having a specific laptop or desktop at my disposal, or copying files across before I leave work etc, can only be a good thing.