Building your digital legacy with Kazuki Nakayashiki, co-founder of Glasp

Building your digital legacy with Kazuki Nakayashiki, co-founder of Glasp

The present in which we stand today is built on what our predecessors have built in the past. Instead, I believe that the greatest legacy is to live a courageous life. It is in the attitude of not being daunted by difficulties, not being overly pessimistic, and betting on the possibilities and hopes of humanity. And I believe this means leaving and weaving our knowledge, wisdom, and history for the next generation.

Our mission is to democratize access to other people’s learning and experiences that they have collected throughout their lives. I believe that by leaving my learning and experiences behind, they can become useful to someone somewhere in the future. In other words, the problem we are addressing is the isolation of knowledge.

After breaking our mission into specific components, we decided to focus on the overlap between curation, knowledge management, and community. In the future, we plan to add a feature that will allow you to backlink your findings with your past highlights or those of others. I also believe that the uniqueness and fun of Glasp’s approach to knowledge management lie in its ability to resurface what you have learned.

As for community, Glasp allows you to connect and learn from other people with similar interests through the learning byproduct: highlights and notes. When it comes to bookmarking and highlighting, a big challenge is that many people end up building a graveyard of random links they never end up actually learning from. How does Glasp address this challenge?

One important aspect is the difference between read-it-later apps and Glasp. There are two processes of information selection when we collect information. One is broad and shallow. The other is narrow and deep. The latter is an area where Glasp and other highlighter apps can show their strength as a place to store important information that has passed the primary sifting process and that you want to keep for a longer period.

Furthermore, the possibility that highlights and notes may be seen by others creates social accountability, so the threshold of action for the user is raised even higher. However, research also suggests that the probability of effective highlighting increases when moderate incentives and pressure are designed in.

While some may argue that the volume of a person’s digital legacy may be reduced by this approach, we place more value on the insight, idea, emotion, and connection to a particular passage within the content, rather than just the act of liking or saving a link. From the perspective that knowledge is about entities and their relationships, it remains to be seen how much value there is in observing how many unconnected “dots” such as the number of unknown words and concepts that examinees have memorized, which is often used in research.

In essence, we are challenging the graveyard issue or the knowledge isolation problem through Glasp’s high core action threshold, the social accountability derived from public highlights, and the visualization of a person’s digital legacy’s contribution to human society using GitHub-like commitment panels. We think it is very noble for people to learn, experience, and pass it on to future generations.

On the other hand, social media platforms, due to their ephemeral nature and social graph-driven connections, place less emphasis on building lasting and trans-generational knowledge. While you may think of some articles, books, podcasts, or videos when it comes to leaving a digital legacy, not many would think of Twitter threads or LinkedIn posts that you liked in the past.

As the Lindy effect says, what is truly valuable tends to persist over long periods, and in that respect, I think the traditional method of information flowing ephemerally is not a good match for building a digital legacy in terms of knowledge building and flourishing. We really appreciate that those great note-taking apps exist. Rather, we hope that Glasp augments them. This way, you can potentially contribute to human knowledge history without changing your workflow!

Several users have thanked us for the interesting and insightful content they have come across using Glasp, which they never would have encountered before. Other interesting use cases are those by people who run newsletters and blogs. It is interesting to see how content creators and their audiences learn from each other and pile on highlights. The social nature of Glasp is the starting point for content writers to connect directly with their audiences, receive feedback, and get inspiration for future posts, and I think this is an interesting aspect of Glasp.

One important aspect is the difference between read-it-later apps and Glasp. There are two processes of information selection when we collect information. One is broad and shallow. The other is narrow and deep. The latter is an area where Glasp and other highlighter apps can show their strength as a place to store important information that has passed the primary sifting process and that you want to keep for a longer period.

Furthermore, the possibility that highlights and notes may be seen by others creates social accountability, so the threshold of action for the user is raised even higher. However, research also suggests that the probability of effective highlighting increases when moderate incentives and pressure are designed in.

While some may argue that the volume of a person’s digital legacy may be reduced by this approach, we place more value on the insight, idea, emotion, and connection to a particular passage within the content, rather than just the act of liking or saving a link. From the perspective that knowledge is about entities and their relationships, it remains to be seen how much value there is in observing how many unconnected “dots” such as the number of unknown words and concepts that examinees have memorized, which is often used in research.

In essence, we are challenging the graveyard issue or the knowledge isolation problem through Glasp’s high core action threshold, the social accountability derived from public highlights, and the visualization of a person’s digital legacy’s contribution to human society using GitHub-like commitment panels. We think it is very noble for people to learn, experience, and pass it on to future generations.

On the other hand, social media platforms, due to their ephemeral nature and social graph-driven connections, place less emphasis on building lasting and trans-generational knowledge. While you may think of some articles, books, podcasts, or videos when it comes to leaving a digital legacy, not many would think of Twitter threads or LinkedIn posts that you liked in the past.

As the Lindy effect says, what is truly valuable tends to persist over long periods, and in that respect, I think the traditional method of information flowing ephemerally is not a good match for building a digital legacy in terms of knowledge building and flourishing. We really appreciate that those great note-taking apps exist. Rather, we hope that Glasp augments them. This way, you can potentially contribute to human knowledge history without changing your workflow!

I also get design inspiration from GitHub, Wikipedia, Pinterest, Twitter, Goodreads, Kindle, and other apps that I feel are close in mission, direction, or area. Several users have thanked us for the interesting and insightful content they have come across using Glasp, which they never would have encountered before. Other interesting use cases are those by people like Ev Chapman and Michael Simmons who run newsletters and blogs. It is interesting to see how content creators and their audiences learn from each other and pile on highlights. The social nature of Glasp is the starting point for content writers to connect directly with their audiences, receive feedback, and get inspiration for future posts, and I think this is an interesting aspect of Glasp.

In terms of leaving a digital legacy for future generations, we think that we need a system that allows data to be stored long-term, secure, and easily accessible. we will be one step closer to being like another social profile that shows your learning footprint and like a next-generation search engine that allows you to search from the digital legacy left behind by people whom you trust or follow. I also believe that if we can visualize, like a family tree, where people get their information from and how and to whom what they have learned has been passed on, we will be able to visualize their contribution to human society. It would be very moving to be able to see how what one’s grandparents and great-grandparents left behind has been transmitted to oneself and to society over the generations, and it would be interesting to see how what one leaves behind is passed on to one’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

"The Content Marketing Handbook - Priceonomics"

Does it get media mentions, traffic, social shares, and customer leads? We’d make content for companies based on their data and then just charge them based on the performance. Throughout this book, we urge you to think of content marketing like a campaign that must be waged with tremendous effort. You need to start with great ideas, you need to have a plan for how to distribute that content, and then you need to execute that plan.

Content marketing is essentially content that is monetized by selling products. To rank well in Google Search results, a website needs two things: content and links to it from other websites. What we could control, however, were inbound links. In order to rank highly in Google’s algorithm, not only do you need good content, but you need other people to link to it. So we decided to start a blog and write about our pricing data.

Sharing information on the Priceonomics Blog struck a nerve. Following the success of our first post, we focused on writing interesting blog posts that shared new information and attracted huge audiences. If you’re going to spend time and effort blogging, there is no point in writing things that aren’t good. Instead, spend a little more time and write something great.

Your company is an expert on its own information — that’s what you should write about. Later companies showed interest in using our software and expertise so they could make their own data-driven content, and we turned that into revenue as well. Suddenly