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I've always wanted a system like this, but I've never been disciplined enough to setup and consistently follow such a system, like you say.

I've thought about wikis, and taking notes of things I read, but those things take too much effort to do. At the moment, I'm searching my Google Reader items and using http://historio.us to catalog articles that I read and think are valuable. It works well because it takes just one click to add an article, but I don't always remember to add what I read.

A few thoughts about what I would want for a system like this:

* It needs to find a balance between in-your-face and hidden away. It needs to be displayed prominently enough, that I remember to rate and review it, but it should not get in the way of what I want to read.

* It should have a rating system of some kind. Maybe on a scale of boring to interesting to changed my life forever.

* It should be in plain text, or able to be exported into plain text. Maybe make it YAML formatted as well. That way, if I want to run an analysis to see which domains have the highest-rated articles, or search them for a certain keyword, I can.

* It should support tags and categories so that I can somewhat organize them.

* Add a field for a summary (and allow me to decide whether I want to require a summary or not). That way, I end up with a very useful annotated bibliography that I can reference to later. I could determine what the key points of the article were without having to re-read it.




I guess to something like this could be leveraged to provide a much better "what should I read?" aspect because people have curated it in a way to indicate what is really valuable under different tags.

Of course you would want public/private, people wanting to use it purely for their own benefit can choose to stay private and not have their interactions aggregated.




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