Back in the days when "small pieces loosely joined" was a thing, I thought Delicious was very, very cool. (I use Diigo (free) now which is the closest I could find to Delicious when it went bad). I needed something that isn't account dependent and works on web and mobile, so matter where I am browsing content I can save a reference to it. Hypothesis looks interesting but imo is more geared to textual annotation than tagging.
Bookmarks are so bad, that they don't even keep your most recent bookmark in a folder at the top.
But what we lost when we lost Delicious was so much potential. For example...
* people were exploring using tag clouds semanticly, to sort of translate how two different people categorised things (you say "cool", they say "hot" etc)
* I think NASA did collaborative tagging where you merely tag interesting things to keep an eye on with nextYear, fiveYears or TenYears then produced a Horizon Report of the overlaps.
* People were making news readers that found interesting items based on your tag cloud and items adjacent to those tagged in your cloud.
* A tag cloud was a quick "Contents page" for any blog out there... You could glance at one and see if this content was for you.
* They were emergent, as in, they evolved over time - so much better than most peoples' idea of categories, or how categories are used in the real world.
I think that despite all the potential in bookmarking/tagging people weren't ready to pay for it - and if you're the kind of person who squirrels lots of things away for later, in a sensible manner, you're going to find a way to do it somehow.
But bookmarks/tags etc could be so much more.
Pinboard used to allow browsing public bookmarks without account. If you have one (not me) maybe you still can go to any tag [0] or user and explore tag clouds / adjacency.
Are.na [1] allows a similar kind of networked exploration of links (more general collections than tags though). It is really a (self-described) rabbit hole (but without tag clouds)
Zotero [2] does have a tag cloud (local and web). IMO their online groups are underrated for bookmarks/references collaboration/publication . . I love its UI ! It works on mobile too (browser or custom apps)
So alternatives do exist, but the scale and innovation are not there. I hope someday we will go back to an enhanced form of popular tagging, maybe using Semantics (to associate), AI (to generate) and open decentralized protocols (to standardize)
[0] Exple: https://pinboard.in/t:bookmarking
[1] Exple Collection : https://www.are.na/emily-degrandpre/collaborative-knowledge-...
[2] Random public group : https://www.zotero.org/groups/25016/digital_humanities_educa...
Love the idea of tag clouds, like I need to capture, "portfolio management systems" and really that's related to stuff like "backtesting tools" and "performance attribution systems", so if there was a knowledge graph connecting all of these terms, that allowed me to explore, in a bit more structured way, than a simple search, would be nice.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/diigo-web-collecto...
"Social bookmarking" started with deli.co.us and has largely been subsumed by reddit.
Beyond some level of complexity, Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, etc become bookmarking tools
...but the ultimate place to find the bookmark managers are in the Chrome and Firefox extension stores:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/bookmark?_category...
There doesn't seem to be any money at all in this space, and any really groundbreaking innovation will be folded in by the browser vendors, so I don't expect there to be much more thwn what's already here.
GitHub is the logical place for an “awesome react” list even if it’s not necessarily intended for that.
Can also piggyback off / strangler fig existing website structure. Ex. bookmarks to titles on goodreads.
Add in a similarity graph (people also bookmarked x), and a democratic way to merge bookmarks that point to the same object.
And if you want to get really nutso, add a resource management system where ppl pay for attention - mint bookmarks as NFTs, commenting has a cost, invest in a bookmark to boost global visibility and get a % of commenting cost
1- We keep the r/whatever (subject matter) stream like view
2- We can always have that enhanced "saved bookmarks" view you talked about. They are not mutually exclusive.
3- To expand on your "reference page" (Wikipedia-like) idea, the bookmarks should be more malleable: We ought to be able to collaborate on reorganizing them under different tag-systems/hierarchies (while they keep their original comments and score)
So it is 3 complementary views: stream view (current Reddit/HN link-posts), personal view (current bookmark managers), and reference view (a more structured “awesome lists”)
Most sites do have at least two (mostly 1+2), but one at least is always rudimentary (like the HN favourites). I myself tried to combine 2+3 (for a private team) using the coda raindrop pack https://coda.io/packs/raindrop-io-11475
I'm coming at it from the direction, where I see the primary action as "collecting" / "cultivating". Ex.
1. See an article you like
2. add it to bookmarks/instantiate the global bookmark
3. curate it a bit - add an archive link, some tags, link to related article
and then the reward is
4. get notified when someone else bookmarks it + comments, a week or a month later
so the inversion is - on HN/reddit, something gets posted once and there's a big discussion and it disappears. this is the opposite where the page grows over time
How did your project turn out?
Yesterday, a Show HN [1] was an RSS reader that displays related HN/Redddit comments. I can imagine bookmark managers alerting you in a similar fashion. It will not be as integrated as you specified (single thread by link...), but the scale will be much bigger : Theoretically you can link it (crawl/api) to any site, then you get a dashboard+notification on your existing bookmarks for new
- discussion threads (HN/Reddit...)
- annotations/notes (Hypothesis.is...)
- reviews (alternativeto.net...)
My coda/raindrop "project" is just a "doc template" we use sometimes to organize bookmarks in a small team. It is not supposed to scale beyond that. Many Coda features [2] come handy.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34188734
[2] like voting, grouping columns, collapsing outlines, hover cards, and word/tag clouds
Linkblogging used to be a thing people did in the heydey of early 2000s blogging. Now it's mostly lost as a form. The spirit of it lives though in the way Mastodon, Slack, Facebook, etc make it easy to share a link and have a preview for it. What's missing is an archival backup view of that sharing. Pinboard gives me mine, but I seldom use it other than to search for something specific I vaguely remember.
One of the bigger issues with bookmarks is they always seem valuable the moment you add them, then that value somehow evaporates most of the time.
Between Bookmark-Hoarding and Zero-Bookmarks, thoughtful curation will always be an art form.
I am not afraid to kill browser windows because I can look up anything in my history.
I want to bookmark something and get a webhook notification that I handle so I can build a database of my bookmarks side by side with other content that comes in through webhooks.
And there are scripts to import your existing bookmarks using the Notion API. Look at this API too if you want to webhook other custom content.
It is Online so it will auto sync between devices.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notion-web-clipper...
There is already > You can also use shortcuts to search Firefox Add-ons, Bookmarks(*), Tabs(%) and History(^).
1) Browser sync became a thing, so your bookmarks are everywhere (del.icio.us let you access bookmarks through their site, but sync made that unnecessary for your personal devices)
2) Searching your personal synced browser history got a lot better using the "omnibox" (no need to create bookmarks to find a site you visited in the past, it's there in history -- and if it's not, it's probably easy to find it with Google)
3) Site "discovery" (remember StumbleUpon?) got replaced with social media newsfeeds and Reddit. People bookmarked and shared fun lists of sites in the early days of the internet, but now algorithmic feeds that learn your interests have taken off
I keep a list of bookmarks of 20-30 very specific URL's for certain pages on sites to skip navigating through the site, some special bookmarklets, etc. But that doesn't need much organization, and it's not for sharing. For everything else, there's the three things above.
Much the same was true of Napster.
Both were amazing ways to discover new things based on shared curation, which got wiped out when commercial interests took over.
- timeless recipes and instructions should rather be saved locally (pdf, mp4)
- research oriented links are better saved in a doc or kms for multi-device and person access.
- travel & outdoors oriented links are sometimes best saved in a map app (especially those allowing you to save notes like “Organic Maps”).
- tech “how-to” links are often not save-worthy when advice is/was easy to find, especially when tech or best practices change.
- organizing many links with folders is really frustrating when categories overlap and you end up duplicating links using extra url parameters (ex: abc.com/#1)
- most things I save only have tags. I use folders for things like account access, car, finance, and health where visible, quick access is important.
- organizing can become a chore and reason to procrastinate on much more of important things in life.
- Naming categories, folders is hard, and I wish Raindrop or other services used word2vec or other tools to improve indexing and search results in case keywords used are insufficient or slightly off
- Snippet bookmarking. I don't want to browse to the whole page again, just highlight and save the piece of it I need to bookmark.
- Annotations. I want to highlight, underline, bold, and comment on what I've bookmarked so that I know why I bookmarked it or what I intended to remember later.
- In an open standard, like JSON, so that I can do things with the bookmarks other than view them in your proprietary website.
Seems like a fairly simple ask, but all the software that promises to do it fell short of my expectations.
Both are local and offer export.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/memex/abkfbakhjpmb...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/research-notes/cad...
I think bookmarks fail because they are buried away and not front and centre, and they mix the concepts of “notes for future reference” and “regularly visited favourite sites”.
I still use Firefox in part because the bookmark tagging and the awesomebar work marginally better than what Chrome does.
Browsers and web UI have gotten dumbed down since even the more power-user oriented days of Firefox and prevalence of RSS.
otherwise, the rest of my bookmarks end up being generated when i'm on some random site, see something interesting on the page, think wow this is really great let me bookmark it, press Ctrl+D, and then never go back to the site ever again. which isn't all that bad.. there's something nice about the feeling of just seeing all of the titles of those sites (and remembering when you found all of those URLs) when you click the bookmark menu, and all of the titles show up. it feels lived-in, like an old house with history.
at some point, i decided an even better way of capturing bookmark-able moments was instead to take screenshots of something specific on the page, and collect them somewhere else, like on a blog. i dont need to go back to the actual page via a bookmark, because the image is enough.
for example, here's where i collect curious and/or spam-like findings, in lieu of a bookmark: https://jollo.org/LNT/bb/effexor1for1dogs/
Most 'ordinary' users had bookmarks for various blogging platforms, recipes, etc, which has now largely moved to social media. Recipes on Instagram, micro-blogging on Facebook, Twitter, articles on any of them.
There's no need for dedicated bookmark services anymore when you can just search that platform. WhatsApp has a Links feature in there so you can just look up past links in conversations.
The rest of the needs have been taken care of by their respective browsers and sync service.
Web sites are more or less ephemeral, with many sites having a lifespan of ~2 years or less. This makes bookmarking less valuable.
I paid for the archival and all, but I'm moving my stuff to raindrop and seriously considering self-hosting something.
Firefox is smart enough to recommend bookmarked sites as I type based on string matches to website titles and URLs - more often than not, that's enough and I find what I'm looking for.
I think this is a better way to find stuff on the web than a taxonomy, I think Google search won and Yahoo's directory lost for similar reasons, the web is just too vast and chaotic to make imposing a taxonomy practical. A taxonomy is more useful for understanding relationships between things than for finding a particular thing. But in this scenario I don't care what relationship the page I want to view has to other pages. I just want to find it as quickly as possible.
I have mild anxiety that someone who doesn't really understand the problem space or prior work will come along one day, try to "improve" this feature, and make it useless...
It tries to do a lot of curation and organization automatically, and it does a very good job at resurfacing what I’m looking for, given that I just throw things in there with minimal hand-categorization effort.
If you’re developing a reading habit in 2023, give it a try.
[0]: https://ktool.io
My most favorite routine now is to subscribe to Hacker News RSS[0] and read top posts on my Kindle. Best of both worlds to me since HN could be quite addictive and unproductive sometimes
I think not. Bookmark.
I've been strongly preferring methods that let me tag items and have a good search - either in addition to or instead of putting them in a folder. If I don't like the "taxonomy" I can just add more tags, instead of constantly trying to figure out the one folder where everything should go.
I can share by creating an additional visitor user, or use the import/export commands. I hope those get built into the UI sometime, but I rarely share more than a single bookmark at a time.
It is an extra step to copy/paste links into Shiori versus browser built-in features, but I prefer not to trust or rely on browsers for my bookmarks unless at work. Seems like everyone wants sync those to accounts without my explicit consent.
If something is ONLY relevant to me in a work context at my work web browser I will store it as a bookmark there.
If something is related to one of my broader life projects, like it makes me take a different perspective on that thing, then I take the time to open up Google Keep, write a blurb about my new perspective, link the article, and tag it accordingly.
I've been contemplating moving these to Obsidian so that the notes can be aggregated and cross-linked, but I am noticing friction where this defeats the abstract point of bookmarks where they are "dump and go". Probably I want to keep using Keep but then have periodic checkins where I move everything from Keep into Obsidian and delete it from Keep?
What I find still missing is a bookmarking service similar to Pocket, but with a local save option and well integrated annotation, tagging, and search functionality. This is of particular value when researching a topic or gathering references for a project. Zotero can provide some of this as it does save web pages, but is not ideal for all cases, especially more casual o exploratory data gathering. I’d appreciate any suggestions.
A few people will bookmark things. Even fewer of them will ever use those bookmarks. In most cases this will limited to a few sites with weird URLs that will often be for work and these will be on the prominent real estate just below your tabs on Chrome. Anything hidden behind a menu is strictly WORN (Write Once Read Never).
The act of organizing bookmarks in an exercise in building a hierarchical categorization, much like we had in the early Internet with the Yahoo directory and similar. These are never natural to use. The mental model is always imperfect and poorly remembered when you try to use it. It's the same reason "tagging" persists while "directories" don't.
I couldn’t find anything that suited my needs so I just went ahead and created my app that simply enables me to save links, tag them and put them in a folder so I can organise them. It uses sqlite under the hood and you can even export it if you want to keep a copy of it. If you’re interested you can find the app (currently in beta testing, iOS only) at [0].
[0]: https://ulry.app
Ref https://web.hypothes.is/blog/varieties-of-hypothesis-annotat... .
My custom markup consists of:
- a number of '*' at the beginning of a line, for important things (more stars = more important; usually just 1 or 2, sometimes 3, if I'm super excited some more.)
- '#' for comments from me between copy-pasted text
- '[' .. ']' on separate lines to group things together, possibly nested (Emacs allows me to easily jump over them, and down or up nested groups).
- '-' on a line between a copy-pasted comment and its reply; '- -' on a line between two comments (or sub-threads grouped with '['..']') on the same level.
- '\SOME_UPCASED_CATEGORY_NAME' for marking something as belonging to that category
I'm organizing the files into a hierarchy of folders. In case of ambiguity, I use symlinks.
I've written a number of tools to handle such a repository well (search names by regex, search names and content by regex, cd into a directory matching a regex, etc.), currently mostly written in Perl[1]. I've recently started using Rust and will probably move those over to Rust over time. One tool I still want to write is for automatically updating symlinks when they break, by looking up moves in the Git history; I'll definitely write that one in Rust.
It's got more than 17K entries now (including symlinks) after 7 years. The size of the .git folder after `git gc` is 51 MB. I synchronize it (simply via Git) between various machines. I use it to find information again pretty regularly. Even though I call the repository "bookmarks", I'm now also tracking projects in it (ideas, plans, sources etc.), as well as job postings and my handling of them.
So the only bookmarks I keep in the browsers are for pages that I use regularly.
[1] in my big pile of scripts, currently not well grouped for consumption: https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin
Also - make use of your address bar’s search functionality. Bookmarking as implemented is still useful.
Seems like something a librarian might enjoy though heh.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not in Edge.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/organize-...
Seems like a small change, but for me a true and very productive reinvention of bookmarks.
...how?! Why?!
I'm pretty sure my maximum was ~15 tabs.
1: That is an understatement - easy as in, 100% automatic and subconscious, like taking a breath. Think about how fast you’ll rack up 7.5k breaths. It’s not a big number.
Any reinvention would have to incorporate search and keep track of sufficient content from the page to do a search for its new location. Either that or link to 3rd party content storage (i.e. archive.org et.al.)
Surprisingly, many of them go back to the 20th century, and a few even to 1995, when I was running Mosaic on SCO Unix.
Now that disk space is so cheap I've been archiving many of the old links to local storage. A really nice bookmark function would do that automatically, but most modern browser interfaces seem to be following Chrome's lead and shuffling bookmarks off into a submenu ghetto as everything turns into a kiosk-style UI.
Among my first steps during setup is to pin that thing visible. Then, I place just the few most relevant folders and links there. Whenever I start to struggle with whether something belongs in-view on the bar, in one of the bar's visible folders, or in overflow, I know it's time to re-evaluate my categories and whether I some of those links are no longer necessary.
Sadly, I still end up with heap of "just in case I ever need them" bookmarks in "Other Bookmarks". To be fair, many of those are imported from other browsers over the years and from before I really started my bookmarks bar strategy.
To be even more fair…their are too many "Other Bookmarks" for me to not feel daunted at the idea of trying to weed through them.
. o O ( Yep: I'm a bookmark hoarder; there might be something I "NEED" in there. )
Overtime, I stopped using it because if I write a keyword associated with the website - if it's either in title tag or in the url, chrome automatically shows that link on the top.. this has been so good.
Ask HN: Full-text browser history search forever?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30696451