To Bookmark Or Not To Bookmark
As I sit in my backyard enjoying the beautiful weather we're having here in wonderful Southern California sipping on some cool sangria that I whipped up this morning and smoking a cigar I can't help but wonder if bookmarks (specifically browser bookmarks) are of any real use. I have literally thousands of bookmarks (okay, maybe not that high a number but certainly in the hundreds), I wonder how many of them I will ever visit again. Despite the fact that great care was taken to file them in the first place, I still find it difficult if I don't recall specifically what it is I am searching for. And on the off-chance that I find the particular bookmark in question, what are the odds that the page will still be active and relevant? The problem further exacerbate itself in the fact that I take advantage of many browsers and many computers. I have a desktop machine at home, two laptops, a server in a datacenter and my work machines (again, a desktop and laptop combination) and on these myriad of machines, I use Internet Explorer (though not too many bookmarks in that), firefox, and safari. There are very few overlapping bookmarks across all of these machines and really, those bookmarks are for sites like WSJ and BBC that really, if they weren't bookmarked, there's little doubt I wouldn't know how to get to them. So again I am left wondering what is the purpose/point of bookmarks. Yet, nevertheless, I continue to squirrel away links like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. It seems that in this digital age, our habits and customs in the physical world gets carried over to the electronic. I find that in the real world, I store away random knick knacks as well. For example, I happened upon a boarding pass from my first first-class flight so many moons ago in an old book as a bookmark (ha, yes, I recognize the symmetry and the irony of it). What of you? Do you find that many of your habits translate across these different aspects of your life?