[clue-tech] Google bookmarks

[Jed S. Baer]

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 11:14:47 -0700
Scott Kruger wrote:

> > > OK, I'll bite. What is Google's interface to bookmarks? I'm not at
> > > all familiar with that.
> > 
> > Heh.  Instead of trying to organize thousands of bookmarks (i.e.,
> > sites I thought were useful) in a way that I can find them again, I
> > look them up on Google.
...
> > I suppose I'm not especially typical in my use of the WWW but that's 
> > what works for me.

> The problem is that if one has a site that took me 20 minutes of hard
> googling to find, and I need to find it a few months later, what is the
> best way of handling it?  Currently I'm trying out furl.net (note .net
> and not .com) and del.icio.us   
> 
> furl is slicker and has an archive feature that is killer, but
> del.icio.us is more open and has a better tagging system.  del.icio.us
> is currently useful just as a way of seeing what other people tag and
> hence can be viewed as almost an ad hoc, dynamic dmoz.org.  The only bad
> thing is that it seems that the only way of sorting the tags is by date
> rather than popularity which would be more useful.
> 
> Both services are still immature, but show a lot of promise.

I've always wondered why there hasn't been something along the lines of
either of these services that runs on the local machine. Architecturally,
there's no reason why all the various browsers can't use the same set of
bookmarks. I think of the way that, for example, Sylpheed will pull e-mail
addresses from Jpilot, Gnome-Card, and LDAP -- although it's a one-way
feature. But the point is that it could be much easier to deal with, and
eliminate redundant storage for those of us who use multiple browsers. A
bookmark daemon could handle SOAP or REST type requests. I suppose it
could be a bit tricky for the display of multi-level bookmark menus, but
still it's a problem that should be solvable. I could sure use a search
function for all of mine. (Haven't gotten far enough into the new versions
of various things to know if it's there.)

For the most part, like Dave, I use google searches. But like Scott, I
tend to bookmark particularly interesting things, especially if it was
difficult to find them, or I got them via a link from someplace else. It's
often maddeningly hard to find things using web searches, if your search
terms are represented by a whole Googlepile of results. Case in point, try
searching for the fix to an error message you're getting. You'll likely
get a whole pile of mirrored reports of the same results. Maybe, somewhere
in all that, you'll find something related to how to fix it. But you might
have to scan through hundreds of pages to find it.

jed
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