Happy to share an article on how to quit Google.  I use a particular process when I meet up with masses of links in a blog post.

I scrape all the webpage links using a Chrome extension called LinkGrabber. (5 seconds)

LinkGrabber copies all those links onto a webpage where I copy with Control-C. (5 seconds)

I open up a writing space in a tool called Etherpad . (30 seconds)

I paste (Control-V) all the links onto the Etherpad.  (5 seconds)

This next step is one of elimination.  You want to get rid of the extraneous links associated with the webpage itself, not the blog content.  For example, there are navigation links, social media links, and just about anything not directly in the blog post.  I just delete them. (5 minutes)

Decide who this link grab is intended for.  The audience can be just for you. I intend this post to be for anyone who wants to do a shallow dive then a deeper one on how to quit Google.  Whatever your audience salience filter you can begin to open up each link and read, make sense of, and share.  I do this by summing up the link’s main point using any highlighting/annotation tool (I use Diigo as my primary and Hypothes.is , too, if I want to socially share stuff). You can change your audience any time by creating another Etherpad and copying the links over to that space. Use new filter. (5 minutes–YMMV).

Questions can be natural salience filters. In my case as I explore each link I ask an initial question:  will this help us ‘de-google’?  If the answer is yes, I make a quick summary. If no, I delete. If maybe,  I leave it to return to by-the-by.

In the end what we are left with is curated list of links that might help the reader de-google their lives in whole or in part.  Also, the writing space is a collaborative one where a community can gather and share further.

Ultimately, “‘Better note-taking’ misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”.” In other words, just making lists and summing up has to have a larger purpose, else it misses the point and just becomes better note-taking. This is an issue I have spoken of before in regards to social annotations and mob annotations.  What is the point if there is no point?  Thomas Merton once accused his fellow monks of being “cozy cheesemakers”.  He was warning against the idea of solipsism. In our case,  while there is value in doing this kind of link grabbing/curation as a way to internalize others’ ideas and thinking,  it can all readily devolve into cozy note-taking with no purpose outside itself.

If we are asking others for their precious attention (read life force), then we need (to the best of our limited selves)to make it worth it.  Here is where I am with my link/grab post now. This is not finished and I imagine it will take one to three hours to get to a first draft, but I include this incomplete work to show you how it is beginning to shape up: