WWW… Wednesday! Glasp

Glasp is a browser-extension tool for organizing highlighted information and quotes for note-taking with a larger, social-driven mission at its core. Over the course of our lifetime, we learn a great deal. We collect Insights relating to our fields of expertise, personal experiences, and other types of knowledge that might be difficult to quantify or categorize. Typically, we record this information in locations only accessible to us—either on devices locked away by passwords or biometrics, or buried in journals tucked away from prying eyes. Without a system in place for sharing this information, ensuring its survival beyond our own, the collective whole of our entire life’s learning would disappear along with us.

The progression of the species as a whole is dependent on the sharing of ideas and developing on the insights gained by others working to solve common problems. Glasp aims to aid in this continued progression by ensuring all of our individual contributions to the collective knowledge of humankind are archived and accessible. This way, others can utilize our learnings to further their own knowledge and the cycle continues.

This may seem like a lofty goal, but it makes sense and it’s got a practical use for users of any level, whether you’re studying for an introductory college course or writing a ground-breaking peer-reviewed paper. The premise of Glasp is fairly basic. Simply use the web as you normally would and when you highlight text you’d like to save, rather than copying and pasting it into a note-taking app like Notion, a small bubble appears presenting you with a selection of colors, which you can use to group and organize insights.

These are then automatically updated on your Glasp page and linked to the source where you found them. In addition to web pages, Glasp works with Kindle Reader, PDFs, and even Youtube Videos, presenting you with a convenient space for highlighting notes directly from the video’s transcript, complete with timestamps. From your Glasp page, you can further organize your notes via tags to help make them more findable by both you and others, as well as share your insights directly with friends or team members.

Glasp also makes it easy to find others with similar interests by suggesting users who have read the same books and articles so you can learn from their insights as well as discover other new reads and sources of information. Each page also has an atomic graph that tracks the genres and fields a user is active in so you can better understand their domain before choosing to follow.

Glasp is free to use. You can learn more and sign up here.