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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

I love podcasts, but I find annotation and pinning very difficult. So many gems are lost once I hear them. I do absorb it, but I cannot reference where I heard it. How do you save the snippets, how do you tag them? Same problem with Audible/audiobooks -- I write notes on the app's note-taking feature but those are mostly lost w/r/t context.

For non-audio, I use EverNote heavily.

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I used to have the same issue. Looking for interesting tidbits in a podcast was like finding a needle in an 1hr long rant haystack, and I personally like to have some snippet as a reference for later when I'm learning, but I found this app https://www.airr.io that lets me save and share snippets of podcasts. Pretty useful!

Only on iOs.

There goes my side business idea.

It took over a decade, but I finally realized that this is the original purpose of the dialectical journals I was required to write for my high-school English classes, before they were coopted as an assessment tool. As it’s a record of your own thinking about the various things you’ve read, it provides a way to figure out where ideas came from in a way that full-text search can’t handle.

These days, I use a traditional index card system combined with a spaced-repetition flashcard system. Each concept that I feel like collecting information about has a small stack of cards that starts with a 1- or 2-sentence definition, in case I’m using a term slightly differently from other people. Below that are cards that represent quotes, notes, summaries, and recommended reading on that topic.

The flash card deck is to make sure I know what things exist, and what words are used in the literature to refer to abstract things. If I need more detail than I can remember, those keywords will get me to a relevant wikipedia page, at least.

Is that the zettelkasten method?

Not exactly; it’s more modeled on a library card catalog. Instead of indexing a physical collection, it’s indexing the things I’ve read. If I need to take detailed, long form notes on something, I’ll do it in a notebook which will then get its own entries in the card index.

I do something similar with a single, monolithic org-mode file where I write down these things. Am I missing out on some useful tricks?

One of the biggest realizations for me was that I need to be free with defining my own categories. It’s more about recording why I’m interested in something than its surface subject— I’m more likely in the future to do something related to my current interests than the article’s subject.

To take a concrete example, the April 2020 issue of Smithsonian has a feature about a tidal power generation startup. I filed that under “sustainable power generation”, as you might expect. I also filed it under “Island communities” because of only a single sentence I found in the article: The startup’s target market is small- or medium-sized islands that are powered by imported diesel fuel.

I've built a podcast app that lets you take notes at specific time stamps.

What I've personally found is it's way too cumbersome to pull the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, press the "Add Note" button (assuming the Now Playing screen is already showing, otherwise another click for that), type in your notes, and click save...and probably rewind 15 seconds because you lost track of the conversation.

But now that I write this out I realize a Siri shortcut could be apt here.

This is one of the benefits of listening to a text-to-speech article over a podcast. You just need to pull up the article's original text and highlight it in that app (if you're using something like Pocket). Still annoying that you need to get your phone out but less so than typing up a note.

Or tap the phone to pause and capture a response (I'm not a fan of VUIs).

Happy to get involved if you take the above route

that seems like an A+ app idea. There’s lots of times I think of something I want to look up later and never remember to get around to it.

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