In this article on navigating content overload, Jorge Medina outlines the importance of having a personal curation system. His premise is “You’re not lacking creativity, you’re overwhelmed” and talks about the concept of digital hoarding and how the overwhelming amount of internet content can lead to decision fatigue. He recommends being intentional about your curation system and using a framework like CODE, which stands for: 

1. Capture - Keep what resonates

2. Organize - Save for actionability

3. Distill - Find the essence

4. Express - Show your work

For me, the whole point of collecting links and keeping tabs open is for inspiration and to learn something new, so I really appreciate this reminder. As far as a “tool” goes, I’m still really happy with my OneTab recommendation from two years ago, and highly recommend it to organize your tab clutter. — CD

Like the previously recommended SciHub, Libgen (Library Genesis) is a shadow library offering free scientific papers online. But in addition to journal articles, this Russian-based site also offers magazine articles, books, and especially full textbooks often required for school. I use it to find scientific papers. Scientific and academic information is often very hard to get, especially in the developing world, so Libgen is extremely valuable everywhere, despite the fact that US-based publishers consider it a pirate site they are trying to take down. I was disappointed my own books were not included in Libgen; I’d be thrilled if they were. — KK  

Until AI takes over search, finding exactly what you are looking for online will greatly benefit from advanced search techniques. This long document, Gwern’s Internet Search Tips, catalogs a hundred ways to increase the success rate of your googling. It is especially aimed at finding scholarly and expert sources.  I learned dozens of tricks. — KK

Experience the dedication of Wikipedia’s contributors through a captivating symphony of sound and graphics at Listen to Wikipedia. This live website showcases real-time changes with bells for additions, string plucks for subtractions, and pitch variations indicating edit size. Unregistered contributors' edits are marked with green circles, and automated bot activity with purple circles. Click on a circle to explore the latest changes. — MF

When I want to understand dense subjects, I just visit Simple Wikipedia. All the entries are written in shorter sentences with easier words. The site is designed for children, adults with learning difficulties or for those trying to learn English, but for me it’s a great way to grasp complex topics, like how nuclear weapons are built and work. It doesn’t work with all pages, but sometimes replacing the “en” with “simple” in the URL will redirect to you the Simple English Wikipedia. — CD 

Here is the best trick so far to get reliable informational answers from Chatbots. 1) Ask it to give you the experts on whatever material you are seeking. 2) Then ask it to answer your questions in the voice of those experts. This elevates its responses to a more informed opinion, instead of “what everybody knows.” (You can skip step one if you already know who the reliable experts are). — KK

There is a movie you saw, a song you remember, a book you once read but now you can’t recall the title. You can hold it in your mind’s eye, but it’s name escapes you. A long online search turns up nothing. For an answer turn to the crowd-sourced answer machine that is Reddit. On the subreddit r/Tip of my Tongue over 1.8 million redditors might be able to identify your target from your written description. They succeed about 1 out of four times. — KK

Library of Congress, the largest library in the world offers free research assistance by experts. I finally had an excuse to use their service and was blown away by how helpful they were. I had been reading History of the Conquest of Mexico written in 1890, and could not find any information for one of the cited sources which was written 300 years prior, so I submitted a request and — in less than 24 hours — I received a response from the Hispanic Division Reference Librarian who linked me to a digitized copy of the manuscript, and 5 other links to codices of Pre-Hispanic History that I would have never discovered otherwise. It’s such an invaluable resource. — CD