Bookmarks

Somewhere around 2004 Tim O’Reilly gave a talk¹ and asked the attendees if they still use bookmarks or not.

The majority said they use bookmarks, and Tim O’Reilly was a bit surprised because he doesn’t use bookmarks anymore². He checks Google or some other search engine to find the stuff again.

Years after the talk I finally got what he meant.

I’ve used del.icio.us, Simpy, Google Bookmarks, and local browser bookmarks quite a lot. Somehow I collected nearly 1.000 URLs, annotated, tagged, and stored on some server. Yet I never searched within them! If I’ve searched something I asked Google to look for it, sometimes I wanted to bookmark my new findings and – you guessed it – had it already bookmarked.

So, what’s the purpose of large bookmark collections? Mechanical Turk?

Honestly, I don’t know. If I’m doing some research, I download³ the important pages to a folder and store it together with the other stuff I’ve written or collected⁴.

Even if you like to keep your stuff online, there are better tools for the job than the online bookmark-managers, for example Google Notebook.

Since I’ve switched to Google Bookmarks some time ago, I’ve reduced my “bookmarks per day” to almost none, why? The reason, I think, is that there’s no way to share them and no “popular” page at Google where my name pops up if I’m the first to bookmark some new content of a Web-celebrity. There are not incentives to bookmark something I don’t really like to keep. Anyway, the content I bookmark today is very likely to be inferior to the content you write tomorrow.

Of course I still use bookmarks, but solely within my browser to keep me from typing the same URLs over and over again.

I’d be interested in how you use your bookmark-collection, what do you do with your hundreds or thousands of bookmarks?

¹ Sorry, I can’t remember which one it was.

² At least he said it.

³ I print the pages to PDF, so that the URL is still available.

⁴ I don’t loose flexibility, quite the contrary: I can search the documents in full-text using Spotlight (something del.icio.us doesn’t offer), assign priorities or some other meaning using labels, and I can work offline as well. Another big benefit is, that I don’t care if some page isn’t online anymore.

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We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. —Robert Wilensky