It’s 2008, so I have something like 15 years worth of bookmarks in my browser. I tend them like a garden, move them to new browser platforms, and back them up. Why? I rarely use them. There are a few that are more like convenient shortcuts, like bill-paying, Google Maps, local weather, my county’s library catalog, etc. But I tend to search for just about everything else, even if I know I have a link stashed several layers deep in my own local bookmarks.
So why bother with bookmarks? Two reasons.
They remind me about cool and useful stuff. They point to things I might not normally look at, like this optical illusion or this photo of the only surviving relative of an obscure composer. In this way, the bookmark list forms a composite view of my lens on the world since I started using web browsers, with some world history mixed in.
They sketch a view of my interests when I post them to a social bookmarking site like delicious.com. My delicious collection only goes back to May of 2007, when I started using it. At some point I’ll export the rest to delicious, after I’ve reviewed them for security issues and stuff that’s just too silly to reveal to the world. An individual’s bookmarks and tags are as interesting to browse as their library of books, which fact is not lost on the community at LibraryThing. Bookmarks and tags are a very good way of showing rather than telling, using examples of your interests to build up a comprehensive view of what you’re about. There are a lot of empty promises being made about social computing, but I think social bookmarking has real value.
