When I first started browsing the web, I was infatuated with bookmarks. Bookmarks were always bookmarks then, never "favorites", because Netscape was the only show in town - unless you counted Mosaic. This was when Microsoft was still in denial about what the web was about.It was so difficult to find anything on the web in those days. All the search engines seemed inadequate in major ways. So the trick was to dilligently bookmark anything you came across which could possibly be of use, because you never knew if you'd be able to find it again. I was such a nerd (and still am) that a good set of bookmarks seemed almost like a little treasure. Sometimes to be shared, sometimes hoarded, always valued. Things are different now. The only bookmarks that I care for are the ones that go along the top of the browser. I would only bookmark a small number of sites that I use a lot - which have URLs which are difficult to remember. None of these would be other blogs, because I keep track of those in my news aggregator. I generally don't bother with blogs that don't have RSS feeds. It's just too much extra work. I know that I miss out on the some good stuff because of this, but there are only so many hours in a day. There's nothing more annoying than accumulating so many bookmarks that it takes longer to find a site in your list of bookmarks than it would to look it up on a search engine. One part of the problem is that I frequently use at least three different computers. My home computer, my main work computer and the reference desk computer. I know that there are services for storing your bookmarks on the web, but they seem kind of clunky. Maintaining bookmarks is annoying. They get outdated so easily. It's the nature of the web. The whole idea/metaphor of web bookmarks is wrong. To compare a web page to a fixed page of a book that can be marked does not match what the web is really about. Imagine a tornado inside a library. Books and pieces of paper are flying everything. Sometimes new things enter the swirling maelstrom, sometimes things leave it, but things are always changing. It is in the nature of URLs to change - except for the ones so stable that they could easily be remembered anyway. I guess another reason why I no longer rely on bookmarks is because I blog. If I find something interesting on the web, I'll blog it. I know that the link will go out of date, but I trust to be able to find it again. Because of the symbiotic relationship between bloggers and Google, I know that my act of blogging a site will help keep it on Google's radar.
9:10:04 PM 
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