Bookmarks are wonderful, aren’t they? A little bit of code that allows your browser to remember so your brain doesn’t have to. It such a simple concept. I used to create nested folders of bookmarks so I could find what I was looking for quickly. I almost never deleted one unless the site vanished. I didn’t even realize how many sites I’d bookmarked until someone turned me on to delicious (back when it was del.icio.us). I thought it was a great idea- I could move over my bookmarks from my browser, search them, and have them when I was at other computers.
Except when I finished moving them all over (clearing out all the broken links, of course), I had well over 600 bookmarks in delicious. Even better, I couldn’t figure out why I had bookmarked some of them to begin with, but I held on to them in case I figured it out. I didn’t want to find that I really had needed that bookmark after all.
When I started cleaning up all of my productivity tools, I had nearly 1500 bookmarks in delicious. I was to the point where I was trying to add bookmarks to pages I’d bookmarked two or three years ago. So, when it was delicious’ turn to be dealt with, I went through every single link. On the one hand, it reacquainted me with some great information I forgot I even had (those were promptly moved to Springpad). It also reminded me that some of my activities have changed, and I was able to delete nearly 300 links on that alone (seven whole tags- gone in the click of a mouse).
By the time I was done poring over each and every link, I had the list down to right around 900 links. Something tells me if I were to go back through it in December, I could probably get it down ever farther.
Right now, I’m working on gaining better control of how I allow bookmarks into my system. Pure links are still going to delicious, and one of my very few complaints with Chrome is that the delicious extension doesn’t handle bookmarks as gracefully as the Firefox one (which I used on a near daily basis). Links to information I need are clipped into Springpad so I can see exactly why I saved the link to begin with. Sites I visit on a daily or near daily basis are neatly organized into Google Bookmarks and live on my iGoogle dashboard for easy access.
Bookmarks are like notes- they shouldn’t be an archive of sites you’ve visited. They should have a purpose. They should relate to projects you’re working on, information you will need to complete something, or serve as reference material until you learn something. They should even bookmark pages that you visit frequently. Bookmarks are a live, ever-changing body of knowledge.
