memonicOfficial Blog

Memonic, Clipboard, Snipi, Pinterest, the list of clipping services seems growing by the day. Each focused at a slightly different angle of the problem. Some are more attuned to product searches, others more generally good at clipping information you deem worthy to keep.

As outlined before, common to all services is this nascent idea of Information or Knowledge Curation. A number solutions for this specific case start to appear, too. Storify, Snip.it, Scoop.it, our solution of course, too. (why are they all starting with “s” and end mostly with it? ;-).

Mostly they are built around the notion of collecting and then re-sharing, may be rating. However isn’t any collection built round this notion kind of antiquated in the moment you re-publish your discoveries to the world?

So what I envision is this: A simple service that allows me to discover information on a specific topic of interest. I shall be able to simply add sources or get sources recommended, get content, select what I deem relevant and worthy to keep, and best I am able to share this with friends and colleagues. Once the system is up an running I get updates on individual items that changed or relevant new posts related to my topic.

Oh and sure, we’re working on this.

Today we’re happy to present another goodie to help you with your information curation using Memonic. ‘You’ in this case is most appropriate if you’re a blogger and using WordPress to do so.

So let us introduce the WordPress Memonic plugin!
What does it do? First and foremost it makes writing articles much more convenient by giving you access to your collected wisdom in Memonic write at your fingertips. The plugin adds a Memonic box to your ‘Edit Post’ screen right below the editor area and lets you navigate your entire collection (yes, that’s including the notes in groups you have access to). Having access to your notes makes it extremely simple to insert quotes or references to sources you found during your research to the article your writing.

Memonic collection readily available on the 'Edit Post' screen

You may insert the excerpt of a note, the complete note or just links to either the source of the note or the note itself. And we didn’t stop there: to make it even easier for you to find the note you’d like to reference we added sorting to the list of notes. Hover over the note and the appropriate actions will pop up.

Options for the Widget definition

If you like to integrate parts of your Memonic collection into your blog as is, the plugin features a WordPress widget to integrate the Memonic badge to your sidebar. Just choose the folder to display, edit the other options if you like – and presto!
You may define as many Memonic widgets as you like.

Installing the plugin is straight forward as the plugin is hosted on WordPress’ repository. Go to the plugin page of your WordPress installation, click ‘Install’ at the top of the page and then search for Memonic. Install the Memonic plugin right from the result list. Once you have activated the plugin, go to your user’s profile page and enter your Memonic credentials to allow access to your collection.

So, happy blogging and let us know about additional features you’d like to see!

“Why Google+ rocks”. Aha. That assertion was brought to me multiple times on consecutive days. Here’s a recent screenshot of my Google+ stream: Same message, twice (additional duplicates omitted to save space).

The early praise was all about Google changing the social network game. After a few days though, non-distinct and re-posted messages started to take the front seat.

And I am lucky to be only exposed to this amount of re-sharing the already shared: Last year Forrester Research published research that shows that almost 70% of people using social media simply consumed content. They did not post, they did not comment, they did not interact. Would they, I’d need to skip the same post many times more.

Given this information inflation we need to find ways to readjust the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The SNR compares the level of desired information (signal) to undesired (background) noise. If it stands above 1 it indicates more signal than noise, below 1 more noise than signal. The trend? Towards ratios consistently below 1.

How can we reverse the trend?

A good place to start is information you deem worth keeping. A given collection of information snippets on a certain topic is a pretty good starting point to filter through the sea of information the Internet has become.

First such solutions sifting through your social media streams and filtering the relevant items are available; NewsMix.Me, Summify, Flipboard, TweetedTimes, etc. Here at Memonic we’re experimenting on such digital noise reduction techniques for the business space. With features such as the dashboard quite a bit is built into our product already (And much more is to come).

Filtering implies omission. This is good if it reduces above screenshot in half and simply would indicate which other person found this helpful, too. It is a problem if we look at the world at large only through such filters. More on that in a later post.

If you login today to Memonic you will note a new tab, the Dashboard. In its first iteration it’s pretty straightforward: Following the notes and web-clippings of your friends and groups has never been easier.

Activity streams and Dashboards are nothing really new. Why did we implement a dashboard?

It is another step to enable user-centric knowledge curation. It is based on our insight that note-taking is as much an individual undertaking as a team assignment. A group of students working on their next class presentation, a team of finance specialists analyzing a shareholding company, a sales team preparing their next sales trip.

Wouldn’t it be great to see what my colleagues on the same project collected? May be directly comment on a clip? Insert your own findings? Add a new colleague to your contacts? Presto: the Dashboard.

This is just the first version of the dashboard. We will ad quite a number of features over the next months – stay tuned.

What a ride: Can you believe Memonic has been live for almost 15 months now?

The note-taking space has certainly come a long way. When we started to think about Memonic – back in 2007 – the online note-taking arena was virtually empty (even Evernote was only launched in 2008). Sure, Delicious and similar bookmarking services were already around… but they were quite limited in their scope, offering not much more than bookmarking. One Note was around – but it was bound to the desktop. It was a clear, blue ocean.

Since then, a lot has happened. We currently track well over fifty note-taking or closely related applications – and many are blossoming. In many ways, it reminds me of the early days of local search – my previous startup. Six years ago, the local search space was still quite fresh, there was no dominant design for it, and many different approaches were tested in real life out there. Today the market has been developed, and dominant design patterns are clearly recognizable. What we see today is a limitation of note-taking to a single use case: Storage of digital notes, clips, pictures, etc. But we know – that just like local search came a long way, so will note-taking.

And believe you can do much more with this basic idea. As we look back in amazement at all which has been accomplished by us and by our peers, we think this is a good time to look ahead.

What’s Next?

From the start, we envisioned more for Memonic, and thus built in multiple sharing and integration possibilities at the onset. Sharing clippings and information with friends is easy with Memonic: Click on the Share button, and you can get a short URL to any note or set (folder), serving as a guest pass for private items; you can share everything on Facebook and Twitter and by mail, and more. Further, you can include any set (folder) with our badge into a webpage. And you can subscribe to all your items as an RSS feed.

The buck does not stop here, and in the next few paragraphs, we’d like to outline our vision of where we want to take Memonic.

Manifest Destiny:

Research (University research and our own) shows that an “information worker” – what so many jobs today essentially are – spends up to half her time re-finding information (meaning: searching for information which has already been found). We think this deserves better solutions than those, which are available (time consuming, and clumsy) today.

With Memonic, there’s a better way. Our tool can now go beyond note-taking, with a process we have coined user-centric knowledge curation. We are particularly proud that a number of blue-chip companies today already use Memonic for their internal information gathering and knowledge curation needs – and thus, need is again, as always, the mother of invention.

How does it work? You can split the process in four steps:

• Search & collect any digital content and knowledge snippets
• Organize and condense your notes (Thus transforming information into knowledge) and access your knowledge anywhere
• Collaborate actively or passively (recommendations anyone?!) with your peers on your notes and you knowledge
• Share and use your knowledge notes – in groups, and with external contacts.

We hope this is the start of a wonderful friendship, and the beginning of doing more with information for companies and for individuals.

If your enterprise or company has been searching for just such a solution to upgrade your own CRM or OSM platform *(think Salesforce, Sharepoint, etc); if you are interested to hear more, or if you would like to give us your feedback on how you think this could be implemented or made better – we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to comment below, or email us at comment@memonic.com.

Thanks for being part of the revolution!