Bookmark Boondoggle

Ah the internet. So much stuff, lots that you don’t need to keep in mind, but some, some of it you want to be able to come back to at some point. Thus the bookmark. Now, as great as straight-forward tree hierarchical bookmarks structures are (ie. firefox’s and IE’s bookmark/favourites), they are actually pretty poor at being able to categorize the diverse range of stuff i want to track on the web. (I won’t go into replication between work and home - foxmarks has solved this issue)

Then came del.icio.us. The birth¹ of the folksonomy. The ability to ‘tag’ each link you wanted to store with whatever kind of meta-data you’d like, to be able to create a rich set of descriptive tags, was huge.

Eventually, all good things come to an end, and del.icio.us was bought out (by Yahoo!). I took the opportunity to clear out all my bookmarks, and stopped using the service. I’ve been getting along without for some time now. However i now feel like i’ve hit the wall. With del it was easy to quickly add and tag just about any link i found interesting. Using the hierarchical bookmarking tools, i have to think about where i want to put the link, rather then just bookmark it. Or, worse, what i’ve been doing is to just drop interesting links into a single folder, making a big undifferentiated pile links.

I’m now reconsidering the reasons i left del in the first place. I was happy enough with the thought of my links being used in aggregate by the original owners for whatever purposes they might have, but once bought by Yahoo i was more concerned with the data-mining possibilities available to them. I’m afraid that the risk reward ratio might have swung back towards the ease and functionality that del offers, regardless of what Yahoo might do with that data.

Rather then having to give up my (somewhat questionable) morals and/or ethics, i could start my own del work-a-like. Sabro.us and Scuttle are two open source tools that i could install on my server so that i can retain control of my own data. I’m thinking that that is the answer i am looking for.

#1 Ok, maybe not really the birth, but certainly one of the biggest popularizers of it.