Better Bookmarking with HistoryHound and del.icio.us

1. Creation. Why do I even have to create bookmarks in the first place? Google's helped a lot, but I still often need to bookmark things explicitly.
2. Maintaining. Bookmarks break. You'd think a bookmark system would store a local copy of what it points at when created. Google cache and/or archive.org will often save the day, but it's not 100% safe. It should be.
3. Usablity. It appears most of my bookmarks are write-only. I create them and never use them again. Mostly it appears to be a failing of titling the bookmark (I can never seem to remember the exact phrasing) or filing. Well, I don't file my bookmarks. Haven't since 1997. Hierarchies are just so lame for organizing information.

I'm trying a combination to ease my bookmarking woes. First, I've been using HistoryHound which is basically "Google for your web browsing history". Jon's program polls your IE or Safari history files and uses VTwin SearchKit to index the HTML.

I don't know about you, but around three times a month I find myself in need of pulling up a page that I've recently surfed before. I find HistoryHound much nicer to use than scrolling through Safari's long history menus looking at titles.

So HistoryHound helps me with operation #1 (I don't have to be as careful to keep track where I'm surfing around) and part of operation #3 (searching on content is much easier then scrolling through hundreds of page titles).

Second, I'm using del.icio.us to upload bookmarks. del.icio.us uses a tagging system to categorize bookmarks which is a lot more useful than hierarchies of folders. Still, truth be told, tagging alone wasn't enough to get me to use del.icio.us. Instead, I'm using it as a poor man's link blog. I considered rolling my own link blogging system, but right now I'm thinking my del.icio.us rss feed seems Good Enough.

Still, neither HistoryHouse or del.icio.us address operation #2. Looks like a third party opportunity to me.

Update: Chris Laprun follows up with knowledge management via bookmarks. Ah, Kant -- good to know I'm not the only coder with a background in the great books.

Saturday, August 07, 2004
12:00 AM