[Giszmo]

Muting … can only be the first step.

I don't want to mute Aaron Swartz because I'm sick of hearing about him but I want to tell my computer that I know of the fact that he died. I also read his wikipedia article.

My computer now should know what facts I know to not bother me with them or even better gray out paragraphs in longer articles when these paragraphs only contain stuff I know.

To teach a computer about what I know, I guess, some TLDR-interface would be needed, where users can tag paragraphs and whole articles (or videos?) with facts discussed in that article. Interested users could have edit wars about the appropriate facts but I would just have to confirm if I read and understood an article with some minimum interaction (slowly scrolling to the end of the article or not clicking a headline link for example).

Better than with some temporary hype like CES, such a system could help to dig deep into some more complex topic. I follow every news about my favorite subject but it gets so annoying to read the same introductions to my subject over and over again. I want to skip that part without missing the news. I want to skip the old news without missing the twist they found on that old news. A tool that could help with that would save the majority of users a lot of time. Of course people that profit from such a system would also have a high incentive to tag paragraphs, too, which should not cost too much time neither. Some day hopefully computers can do the tagging part.