A friend of mine, Kaushik, wanted to share all of the cooking videos he’s accumulated with his friends.
He cooks a lot, and really likes the format of Instagram Reels for cooking – the short, snappy, see-exactly-how-to-cook-the-meal approach. But there was no native feature in Instagram to share the list of all of his saved videos. And Instagram is so noisy.
So much else going on there, so easy to lose track of why you’re there.
He coded up this to solve his own problem.. It takes all the videos, auto-populates a Notion DB, and then shows all the cooking videos he’s posted. Voila.
We were thinking about another use case for this – Slack Channels. Many Kernel channels see a lot of links flow through it on a regular basis. Would it be nice to see a list of these links in a “library view”?
It would be a local, communal knowledge graph, and probably would feel a lot different than a Google search or even something from ChatGPT. It might feel better than seeing 100 links in Slack and knowing you can’t read them all.
Speaking of GPT – Kaushik mentioned wanting to play with a search bar, if you did have a library that grew to contain a lot of links (let’s say, a library of all the links ever shared in Kernel Slack). That is another direction this could go.
The overall question, which I defer to Kaushik to refine, is ‘how to healthily foster a communal knowledge graph’ or perhaps, a mini-web library? How might it be built in as prosocial, convivial a way as possible? These web libraries might need ‘data doulas’ as Kei Kreutler says.
I welcome his additions, and any thoughts or considerations you might have on where this WIP might go next.
Related Links:
- The Kernel Library, using Obsidian as a first interface
- Fi Carty (KB7) and her adventure: “What do community-operated libraries of knowledge & media look like on-chain?” & her first pass at a small, internet library
- “An app can be a home cooked meal”, Robin Sloan