What is Mindstone and how to use it?
Mindstone helps you save time by optimising your information diet.
One click to save articles, podcasts, videos or anything else you find on the internet.
Get to what’s important, while discarding the rest and knowing everything is safely stored whenever you need it again.
Dive deeper into the content that really matters, by highlighting important passages, automatically summarising long articles and removing the clutter surrounding information you engage with online.
The above paragraphs are extracted from Mindstone Chrome Browser extension.
What is Mindstone?
It’s essentially a webpage clipper, pretty easy to use. You just need to install a chrome extension. There is (of course) also a mobile app as well.
Mindstone is useful because anytime you chance upon interesting information, but it may not be appropriate time to read the whole article or story, you can choose to “send to Mindstone”.
It does “highlights, comments, notes”
This feature allows users to make own annotations, like writing into a book edges (personal notes).
Search function extracts the notes and comments, to show linkages between various articles (although not as cool as obsidian yet).
The articles can be filed into “workspaces” which are similar to “folders”, so it’s easier to understand for most people.
The articles can also be “tagged” so future retrievals are more flexible. One common problem with tagging is coming up with so many names for the tags until you become unsure what to use at what situation or cannot remember how the tags were used previously.
One suggestion for using tags efficiently is to tag using the following settings.
- Stage of progress — To Do // Doing // Done
- Information source — email // web // youtube // social media (as in where you first saw this piece of information — a spatial link)
- Workspace — sometimes one item can be relevant to 2 workspaces, so by putting the article into one workspace, and then using tagging to make it also relevant for the second, the search results become more useful
Share content
Share the articles and your highlights and comments to be shared with your friends, colleagues, and see they can also add in their ideas as well. This becomes an easy and powerful way of collaboration via useful articles.
You can also archive the webpages and information which are no longer relevant. Clearing them away helps keep your information pool tidy and useful. Very often, we gather so much information from many different sources, until the point we get overwhelmed and don’t even know what is from where and for what purpose.
Summary — Using Mindstone
Mindstone becomes an easy way to centrally pool together all the digital resources from various channels such as email, websites, youtube, newsfeed, etc, into a single location for easy referencing later.
The advantage of using Mindstone is simplicity and ease of use .The ability to add comments, highlights, notes, organise, tag and share are the most basic necessary and useful tools. If it’s not necessary or beneficial for the user, there’s no point in having it available in the system as that will become a visual clutter and doesn’t serve to benefit the users.
