Last month being the anniversary of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, I published my first blog post on Medium explaining a major benefit of ubiquitous linking.
Today we published a summary and extension of that blog post: A Huge Source of Distraction and How to Solve It – Hookmark.
I noted:
Being able to rapidly access information is a hallmark of expertise enabled by various brain mechanisms underlying human consciousness. For example, chess experts can rapidly (as in within seconds) encode the exact configurations of many chess boards, and retrieve them equally fast. Many cognitive psychologists believe this ability is mediated by what K. Anders Ericsson called “long-term working memory.” The Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking’s rationale section summarized some of the cognitive psychology behind rapid info access.
As such, Hookmark is a CogSci Apps invention designed to extend and protect your consciousness. It extends it by enabling you to rapidly access information. It protects your consciousness by making you less dependent on search and navigation: two huge sources of distraction. (When users look a their browser, email, or Finder, they often get distracted. That too has a cognitive science explanation.)
When we (CogSci Apps) review feature requests for Hookmark (whether they come from customers or ourselves) and update our product road map, we always keep principles of cognitive science in mind. Hookmark 5 contains new improvements along those lines, as will Hookmark 5.1 (which is available in house; we’ll release the beta’s after Hookmark 5 “golden master” is released).