ever thought about bookmarks? they mark sites on the web so why are they called bookmarks and not webmarks or pagemarks? anyways, for awhile now i’ve engage in the act of actively bookmarking interesting articles (as opposed to sites) i read, but its usefulness has been limited by how web browsers store favourites in folder/file combinations.

when i add a bookmark, i tend to have a couple of top level folders that divide my bookmarks into genres, such as web related, music related, etc. then i may have sub folders within these folders like xtina or britney under music. so that’s all dandy if a particular article is say about xtina, but what if an article is about the p2p effect on britney cd sales? do i store it in tech, or music? and if i decide on one or the other, will i be able to find where i stored it in the first place?

the second big problem for me is how you title a bookmark. in most browsers, the default title is the title of the page. but some sites are annoying in that the title of the page doesn’t relate to the article (take this page for instance). in any case, if i take the default title or add my own, i might not be able to find it again later because the title is not entirely descriptive of the content. for example, what if that britney article had a section on how xtina’s cd sales were affected due to p2p, i’d probably title the article without mention of xtina and so i would never find it by looking at the titles. the mozilla family of browsers have one advantage over internet explorer in that you can add a description to each bookmark, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll add the right keywords in the description to find it again. plus, it takes too much time to add descriptions.

what i think i really need is a program to organize bookmarks that interoperates with internet explorer and mozilla on multiple platforms. in my ideal world, i would have the program download and locally cache every page bookmarked, and then parse through it looking for keywords as google would. so it would be like longhorn for bookmarks + a local cache. the addition benefit of this system would be that you can read thru the articles locally as if you had a library; you would still be able to read pages that disappear or end up in a “subscription archive”. you could also move your bookmarks and cache around to multiple computers. the drawback would be that this system wouldn’t work really well on “interesting site” bookmarks.

an easier alternative is to use my blog as my bookmark manager. basically, all i would have to do is blog about every interesting link i come across summarizing the major points and angles. then when i need to find the bookmark again, i’d just have to search thru my blogs (note to self: make a better search). it’s certainly easier than writing a program, but then i would have tons of blogs that while possibly interesting to you, are about nothing in particular. i don’t think i’ll do that.

as an aside, i think blogs are particular useful in ways like this. they don’t act as diaries, but records of things you might need again in the future. for example, i was talking with my friend about minidisc players, and wanted to relay my experience with the utter crap the software was. so i sent him a link to my blog entry and that pretty much summed it up without me having to retype my anger again.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: blogging, bookmarks, webgeek