Beach Brain by Thomas Shahan

The Pocket Memory Bank

A workflow hack that turns Pocket into a powerful personal knowledge base and search engine

At some stage in the not too distant future, we’ll have neural prosthetics that augment our faculties by connecting from our brains to the cloud to provide us with a bunch of capabilities that we don’t have “onboard”. This will include everything from bionic sight through to bionic memory.

As someone who is memory-challenged, I’m quite excited about the latter and am getting prepared. This post documents the hacks I’m using to create a personal knowledgebase that could form the basis of that bionic memory in the future.

For a long time I’ve wanted my own personal search engine. I started by consolidating 15 years of email archives into gmail so that I could easily search through historical conversations and contacts when I needed reminding of something that was communicated to me by a friend or colleague.

As a creature of bits not atoms, the web has been my sole source of reading material for many years so I wanted to find a service that stored everything I have read or intended to read and could make that content instantly searchable. There have been a few attempts at this but ultimately, promising services like trunk.ly and kippt shut down or moved on to solve other problems. Many of the great reading apps available today, like Flipboard, focus on realtime reading and don’t have adequate features for mining the linked content as it builds up over time.

I was just about to start hacking together a Google custom search engine when I discovered that Pocket, the popular read-it-later app, has a premium service that lets you search through the actual content of the links that you have saved to it. Pocket also has a great mobile app for both reading and searching that content as well as an API with lots of handy third party apps. So, if I could find a way of getting all of my links into Pocket, I would have the starting point of this augmented memory, right in my pocket.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Create a free Pocket account
  2. Export your Delicious, Instapaper & Chrome bookmarks. In each case, an html file of those links will be produced.
  3. In Pocket’s web app, use the Import Instapaper and Import Delicious tools to bring in those links.
  4. For your historical browser bookmarks, install the Batch Save Pocket Chrome extension then open the html file of your exported bookmarks in a new tab, highlight batches of the links on that bookmarks page and hit the Batch Save extension button. By the way, this Batch button can be used on any page with links so if you have other link archives, just get them into an html file, open in Chrome and use this tool.
  5. Create an account on IFTTT (if this then that), then use the recipes for sending the links you tweet, the links you fave and the links you retweet to Pocket. To be clear this will send future tweeted links not your historical ones. I’m working on a solution to get the historical ones - follow @chrisboden for more on that.
  6. Install the Pocket Chrome extension (tools for alternate browsers, here) and use that from now on for bookmarking your links instead of the native Chrome bookmark button. This will ensure that all of your links are backed up and searchable.
  7. Pocket is of course also great for your reading queue so to get all of the historical links out of the way of that queue, you can use the Pocket web app to move all of the imported links into the archive. They are of course still readable and searchable in the archive.

Now you should have all of your historical links added to Pocket (and archived) and with the browser extension and IFTTT recipes, you have a workflow in place that will ensure that all of your links get saved to Pocket and are available to read via their various apps.

To get the deep search functionality, you need to upgrade to Pocket’s premium service. For $44.99 a year, this service offers an offline backup of all the articles and webpages you’ve saved and full-text search of all of that content with advanced operators to help you find very specific things.

I find that being able to whip out my phone and instantly search through every article I’ve read and saved is incredibly handy, saving me hours of Googling, trawling through Twitter timelines, browser history or poorly organized bookmarks. Every time I hit the fave or save button, I’m adding to my person knowledgebase and that feels like it could be a really valuable asset when that non-invasive neuroprosthetic becomes available.

Ping me @chrisboden if you have feedback or suggestions