So since playing with Flickr and working on a little fun project at work on (cough) folksonomies with Mr Webb, I’ve become obsessed with tags and the ways in which they can be used to build better navigational interfaces. Currently I’m interested in how we might use tags for better folder-less bookmark management in web browsers.
The way I see it, most people find the style of bookmark management commonly used in web browsers pretty much totally useless. Once you’ve added the two or three sets of bookmarks that you might use every day the bookmarks section of the web browser swiftly becomes very quickly a wasteland to which links may be consigned and never looked at again. After a while even the simple job of finding a URL that you previously bookmarked becomes so difficult that it is often easier to instead use Google to find the page afresh. Clearly there is something wrong here.
The most obvious thing that is wrong with bookmarks (other than that not enough browsers make them easily searchable) is that keeping them organised is an intensely complicated job. If you bookmark things regularly, it takes almost no time for your lists to grow to be hopelessly out of control. And then we’re expected to organise them into folders. But URLs and links can talk about any subject and can be categorised along enormous ranges of axes - they are much more suited towards databased organisation than they are the simple heirarchies that folders can afford. One URL will seem to fit into your ’social software’ bin - but also would fit equally wellin your ‘do something about this URL’ bin, and perhaps should also be in your ‘relevant for latest project’ bin. Currently the only solution is to put the same thing in three separate folders - creating three bookmarks and no sense of how they relate to each other semantically. And putting things into multuple folders can be a slow and flow-disrupting process.
To summarise the problems with current bookmarking systems then, we could say that (1) the process is slow and annoying (2) that it requires us to continually refine and redevelop our taxonomies if we’re going to keep track of everything, (3) that URLs can belong in a number of bins and that (4) we can be left with unmanageably large lists. An ideal system would therefore speed the process up of both bookmarking a site and retrieving it later. An ideal system would try to alleviate the problems of categorisation and would work as an a priori assumption that a URL might wish to be stored in multiple bins. An ideal system would not display all the links by default. An ideal system would, in fact, use tags…
Now I’ve not worked through this completely yet, and I know there are some systems that allow the use of keyword addition and searching to a URI (I think it’s either in Firefox or is a simple plugin to it), but I don’t think they’re quite there yet. So let me walk you through where my thinking is at the moment and hopefully some of you guys can take it further or develop it in an interesting way.
So first things first, the process of adding a bookmark. On a mac you can either use a keyboard shortcut to trigger this or you can go to “Add Bookmark” in the main menu. Here’s one suggestion about what you might get when tried to bookmark a site:
