I've had a persistent desire for a knowledge management protocol/service that goes beyond the scope of all the software and strategies discussed on HN regularly. I firmly believe that the needs and barriers are pretty universal between people (not personal preference or individual at all) and that in a way, we are rate-limited without it, bound to arrive at solutions only for them to be lost again. I have a dense page in my Zettelkasten dedicated to the idea, but in summarizing it's meant to provide an interoperable framework that accepts different forms of media (not just text, though it would be central) and facilitates various kinds of analysis and thought, e.g. detecting similarities, duplication, extrapolating etc. I'd imagine a specialized form of distributed version control would be needed, and various platforms and tools to solve the capture and retrieval dilemma, and in particular the problem of persistence and link rot. To be sure all I have is a list of problems and some possible clues for solving, but the most hopeful of those is a distributed service that is widely used but very open. It could consist of some commercialized tools or engines, but the underlying protocol must be open for anyone to use.

If the idea I have took off it would take the information age to new heights, with the next phase being ubiquitous use of brain-computer interfaces.

Imagine how productive we would all be if we never forgot. All ideas, perhaps even a collection representing all of humankind, transcribed to a format that respects our time, and aids further thought.

We can reach in and take the ideas that work from other systems, such as Zettelkasten, Nogutchi Filing System, The Web and any of it's parts (markup, protocols), the study of sciences, humanities etc.