I have a confession to make. I’m quite good at collecting interesting websites, articles and blog posts. I’m considerably less good at actually doing something with them. I suspect I’m not the only one. There are plenty of excellent bookmarking and read-later services. Pocket was a well-known example until Mozilla shut it down in 2025. Services like Raindrop.io (https://raindrop.io/), Wallabag (https://wallabag.org/) and Karakeep (https://karakeep.app/) offer different ways to collect, organise and rediscover things you’ve saved.
But there’s something about the whole concept of read later that bothers me. Far too often, it becomes read never. At least: for me. I save an article because something about it catches my attention. Perhaps it’s an unusual idea, a small open-source project, or somebody experimenting with a completely different way of using the internet. I fully intend to return to it. But then another interesting link appears. And another. Before long, I’ve built a rather impressive collection of things I may never look at again.
What if bookmarks could talk to each other?
That question eventually led me to a little experiment I’ve been building on my Linux laptop. I call it Bookmark Conversations. The idea is quite simple. Instead of treating bookmarks as individual items waiting to be read, why not treat them as a collection of ideas that might have something to say to each other?
Okay, that might sound a little abstract. Imagine saving an article about someone running a tiny personal website. A few weeks later, you bookmark something about alternative internet protocols such as Gopher or Gemini. Somewhere else in your collection is a story about people building their own little online communities. Individually, they’re interesting links. Together, they might suggest a bigger story about people trying to make the internet more personal again. That’s the kind of connection I want Bookmark Conversations to discover. A connection I might never have thought of myself.
My bookmarks are already in Obsidian a.k.a. Markdown
I use Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) to collect bookmarks, along with occasional notes about why I found something interesting. I wanted to keep doing exactly that. No new bookmarking service, no additional inbox, and certainly no need to move everything into another proprietary system.
Bookmark Conversations simply reads the bookmarks from my Obsidian vault. It retrieves the articles, analyses their contents and looks for unexpected connections, interesting contradictions or questions worth exploring. Yes, it uses AI (running locally on my laptop), but not to write summaries of everything I’ve saved. There are already plenty of tools that can do that. I’m much more interested in the relationships between things. And importantly, it doesn’t change anything in my Obsidian vault. The application is completely read-only, runs locally on my Linux machine and stores its own data separately.
A small discovery every morning
The current version runs automatically. Every morning, it checks my bookmarks, processes new material and searches for possible discoveries. Around 10 o’clock, I receive a desktop notification telling me what it found.
Sometimes there’s nothing new. That’s fine. I’d rather have no discovery than a completely artificial connection between two unrelated articles. When something interesting does appear, I can open a small dashboard to see why the application thinks the connection matters, what the original sources actually say and which questions might be worth investigating further. I can also save a discovery as a Markdown file. That means I can use it in Obsidian, develop it into a blog post, or simply keep it for another day.
A different relationship with bookmarks
Bookmark Conversations is still an experiment. I’ve been through quite a few versions already, fixing problems with retrieving articles, improving the quality of discoveries and making sure the whole thing can run unattended. It’s now in a longer test period, so I don’t yet know how useful it will prove to be. But I like the underlying idea. And there’s already a promising sign: Bookmark Conversations has found its first genuinely interesting connection between bookmarks that, at first glance, seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s exactly the kind of unexpected discovery I was hoping for, and one I might never have made on my own.
Most bookmarking tools help us collect information. Some help us organise it. Others remind us to read what we’ve saved. What I’m trying to build is something slightly different: a tool that helps me think with the things I’ve collected. Because maybe that’s the real problem with read later. We assume that the value of a bookmark lies in eventually reading that particular article. But maybe some of its value comes from the connections it can make with everything else we’ve discovered.
I don’t necessarily need another app telling me I have 500 unread articles. I’d much rather have one occasionally whispering: Hey, remember those two things you saved a few weeks apart? I think there’s something interesting going on here.