In my spare time I’ve been learning an intriguing piece of software called SuperMemo. I’ve never seen anything like it; it’s strangely addicting. It was written by a fellow in Poland, he’s been working hard on this one idea for about 20 years. It’s not related to my business, but it is (obliquely) KM.
Basically it’s learning software. It automates a process he calls “incremental reading.” You import high-quality articles into SuperMemo, then as you read you highlight the best parts. SuperMemo extracts the highlighted sections, saves them, and keeps track of them by a sophisticated algorithm. They seem to disappear, but then they come back to you days or weeks later, just about the time you would normally forget them altogether. The whole idea is spaced repetition of any snippet of knowledge that you would like to retain. You can literally be reading 15 articles in parallel, simultaneously, easily changing their relative priorities depending on your interests, saving only what matters, and SuperMemo organizes it all for optimum retention. Sounds like a hyper way to read, I know… but it’s oddly enjoyable.
SuperMemo is hard to get the hang of, but I think I’m going to like it. I learned about it in Wired, here. Definitely not for everybody. But it isn’t every day that I run across something totally new. Ask me again in a few months; I’ll know by then if it’s a toy, or a real tool.
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