Sensible bookmark organisation

Published on 20^th May 2008 in Productivity, tagged bookmarks, organisation, relevance.

The amount of information that we’re bombarded with increases every day. Processing the numerous links to websites, videos and photos is one thing, but how do we keep track of what we’ve seen so that we can refer back to it at a later date?

Bookmarks are the traditional solution; file away a link to the website in your browser for safe-keeping. Yet I’ve found myself bookmarking websites very rarely of late, relying instead on my memory to recall which appropriate websites I could visit or what I could type into Google to find what I was looking for. Does the bookmark paradigm scale effectively to deal with the massive amount of information that we encounter?

First, let’s look at the different types of links that you might save:

• The essentials – These are your dozen most visited websites, which you can remember the addresses of, but it’s handy to keep a link to them to save time. Think news websites, email, search engines, social networks and other places that are your first port of call when you launch your browser.
• Weekly sites – These are websites which you visit maybe once a week, but don’t need immediately at hand. They might include online banking, supermarket home delivery or university portal pages.
• Site specific – These are resources that can be remembered using a website’s own bookmarking system. Photos on Flickr, friends on Facebook and videos on YouTube can all be saved within their own little microcosm.
• Seen, but not forgotten – These are websites which you want to remember, but you don’t need to refer back to them on any regular basis. Inspirational websites designs and interesting articles might come under this category.

To me, these four groups encapsulate all the places that we ever need to remember on the Web. Yet how should we store these URLs? Here are the main options:

• Browser bookmarks – The traditional choice, using folders to organise links like you would files.
• Social bookmarks – Websites like del.icio.us and mag.nolia.com provide a ‘social bookmarking’ interface, storing your links online where they are, by default, publicly available. Links can then be added and retrieved via a number of methods.
• Customisable portals – Websites like Protopage and Google’s customised homepage allow users to create a personal start page which can store any number of links, email mailbox previews, RSS feeds and more.

I played around with a number of solutions and one thing was clear; there’s no single storage method to suit all link types. However, you can create a system that, in theory, will allow you to access the links most relevant to you in relatively little time. Here’s what I came up with:

• Store your essentials in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. That’s the small links section just below the address bar. This allows you to get to your most frequently used websites in a single button click.
• Keep your weekly sites in your browser’s bookmarks. These don’t need to be available right away, but you can quickly get to them in a couple of clicks.
• Leave site specifics to the site in question. YouTube, Flickr and co. offer more suitable ways of visualising your favourites than any other method will.
• Use social bookmarking for the seen, but not forgotten. I hadn’t used these websites before, but I’m now on del.icio.us and it’s superb for keeping track of all the neat designs I discover or articles that I read on sites that I don’t want to subscribe to.
• Customisable portals work well for essentials and weeklies too. I still use Protopage because when I launch my browser, I can get to some sites quicker because it allows more room for links than my bookmarks toolbar. Being able to see my email at a glance is another added bonus.

Of course, there are numerous other combinations that you could use, but this is the one that I would recommend that people try. Whichever method you use, the most important thing to note is that your most relevant bookmarks should be the easiest to access and the ones that you visit the least shouldn’t get in the way.