The amount of information that we’re bombarded with increases every day. Processing the numerous links to websites, videos and photos is one thing, but how do we keep track of what we’ve seen so that we can refer back to it at a later date?
Bookmarks are the traditional solution; file away a link to the website in your browser for safe-keeping. Yet I’ve found myself bookmarking websites very rarely of late, relying instead on my memory to recall which appropriate websites I could visit or what I could type into Google to find what I was looking for. Does the bookmark paradigm scale effectively to deal with the massive amount of information that we encounter?
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Published in Productivity, tagged bookmarks, organisation, relevance on 20th May 2008. No comments.
All of the information we create and use is either on your computer or in ‘the cloud’ of servers on the Internet. The choice between these two usage patterns is an interesting one. My email is all online via Gmail (although I access it via a desktop application), but everything else is on my own computer. My feed reader, calendar and task manager are all offline standalone programs. I don’t anticipate moving these into ‘the cloud’ anytime soon, but what about bookmarks?
Over the last few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped adding many bookmarks to my browser. If I see something new, I either subscribe to the site’s RSS feed if I like it or simply remember where it is. I use the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox just below the address bar, but I rarely get to sites via the bookmarks menu option. More commonly, I use my Protopage to get to my most visited sites.
I’m thinking of slimming down my browser bookmarks to just my most commonly used ones, then shipping all the rest over to an online bookmarking system like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. I’m wary of using a Web-based system though; how quickly will I be able to find links? Will the need to tag everything make it a less attractive prospect? It would be really interesting to see a study or analysis of the usability of different bookmarking methods.
Published in Websites, tagged bookmarks, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia on 21st April 2008. One comment.