How to: Portable Tagging…the time is now (3 years ago).
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007Today we’ll talking about how to import your bookmarks from browsers and convert your browsing methods to focus on the idea of remembering important things about the links instead of remembering where you put them. When you are considering hundreds of bookmarks, as many people have, this method is necessary for scaling and to prevent incredibly unnecessary limits.
The idea here is that using del.icio.us to do the work for you, it is possible to think about bookmarks, the internet, and navigation in a new way. The old way could be considered a rigid, organizational construct that is a leftover from a few decades of simple, common sense-based professional computing. This new way of approaching it is basically a by-product of the wholesale industry adoption of tagging, which is a construct of a lazy new generation really making computers do the work for them. The sad part is that this time laziness triumphs. Firefox makes it even easier.
If you don’t have a delicious account, go there and sign up, and then in the settings you will want to import or upload your current bookmarks. Don’t feel pressured; it took me about three years to do this.
From here, the flexibility of the system gets pretty insane. You can tag things however you want (for example, I didn’t tag anything old but tag everything new). This contrasts bookmarks in that there was only one place you could put one bookmark without duplicates. Now, you can have one bookmark with an endless amount of ways to organize and find it via infinite tags.
There’s more. You can subscribe to tags and get alerts from fairly specific triggers. You can add people to your network. You can add me and see what I mark. I watch people that I know have an eye for trends and the like. The great downfall of the networking on delicious is that right now (changing in 2.0) there is no simple way of inviting people or adding people; the only way is to visit their profile and hit add.
(Side note: you can bundle tags. This essentially means that you can tag tags. That drives me a little beyond the edge as it’s time to get less organized, not more!)
With all these benefits, a single notable negative trait, and the potential coming from the next version, not even I could continue to stubbornly insist on using browser-based, tagless, single-computer bookmarks. Thus, I recommend to others to join me in moving on (detailed usage video!).
Footnote: they’re called bookmarks, not favorites. That’s simple, settled, ancient terminology (and not even Microsoft can change it).
