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I keep making bookmarks, but I don't know why... I never, ever, ever, ever go back and use them. I even think about how I'm not going to use a bookmark as I cre

I keep making bookmarks, but I don't know why... I never, ever, ever, ever go back and use them. I even think about how I'm not going to use a bookmark as I create it. :-\

codeptualize 5y ago
I gave up, no use. Important work links I know how to find again (I always remember who I send links to on Slack and then I can find them very quickly). I gave up on collecting links, I'm not organized enough, it always turns into an unusable mess.
voltaireodactyl 5y ago
Right there with you. I have this vague dream that one day, the tech will be there to automatically collate and reference all my stored data more easily, sort of like how I work with physical sources. Even as I type this, though, it feels more and more like a pipe dream.
- bckr 5y ago
  What would be the minimum useful version of this? How do you work with physical sources? What makes you think it's a pipe dream?
  - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
    Working with physical sources = being able to spread ten books out on a table and easily flip between sections in a tactile way (physical pages). That’s really what I mean. For some reason physical objects are much simpler to work with (for me) and opening ten windows (even on a giant screen) just doesn’t work for me the same way. The minimum useful version for me would be something that recognizes all media types AND allows commenting/notes in a standard format that links between them and is easily manageable. In particular that would mean for me: - read/highlight/notate/manage/organize functionality for epubs, PDFs. - import physical books via ISBN and allow me to attach my notes there (ideally with a companion phone app that lets me scan/photograph relevant sections. - photo library (ideally containing the aforementioned book pics while leaving them linked to the notes). - multiple routes for surfacing old stuff. But in all honesty: the reason I think it’s a pipe dream is because I’m fairly certain the limiting factor is being human, not the technology. Like I’m kind of hoping for a new paradigm for digesting media, but I also recognize that’s a pretty steep ask. Relatedly I’ve been trying to build what I’m talking about out of emacs since COVID started, and I get some of the way there by org roam + org noter, but the difficulty of connecting emacs with various work cloud services and such has proved quite daunting. But I’m still at it, because most tools of this nature are dev centric, whereas I’m prose centric, so much of my frustration comes from having tools that are CLOSE but fall apart in the last mile workflow (for my purposes). Honorable mention to hookapp for mac, which I’m still wrapping my head around but may end up solving some of my nicher problem areas.
    - bckr 5y ago
      Thanks for going into detail on that. This makes me wonder if information organization and traversal is truly the killer app of AR + AI. Arrange your data like physical objects. See the connections like literal threads in 3D space. Have a librarian who can actually understand your natural language queries help you find things.
      - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
        For me it absolutely would be. Allow me to interact with my (personal, DRM free, already owned and stored locally) digital media as if it were physical media and you will have my money day one (unless Zuckerberg).
        bckr 5y ago
        Awesome. Let's go back to "what is the simplest useful implementation"... Let's say you have some static media like PDFs. Let's say you can use VR/AR if you want, but you can also just use your flat screen with a handheld motion controller. Would it be useful to create a 3D world where those PDFs take up space and stay where they're put? Let's say you open an app on your computer that shows you a virtual room, and there's a menu that lets you select a folder from your computer full of PDFs. You open the folder and a pile of physical documents appears as either a stack, a spread, or something messier. Viewing from there would be really important. You'd need to bring the camera in really close to give you the ability to read anything. Or magnifying glasses. Maybe the ability to clone and transform pages and parts of pages while leaving them linked to their parent documents.
        voltaireodactyl 5y ago
        I dig everything you’re saying and think the way forward is something like that. But right now implementations are very limited by screens, in my experience. Like, even if there’s 360 of a virtual space avail to me by dragging the screen, it ends up having the same issues — it seems like, for me, a persistent space is needed. There’s also some research to suggest that having such permanence is helpful to learning — it’s easier to remember info from a physical book because your brain can associate the CONTENT with the actual physical experience of the book itself, which leads to greater retention (I think it’s similar to how mind palaces are meant to function). A mix of AR glasses and physical simulacra is where I expect it to go eventually. As in, I have 10 book “blanks”, and when I use AR glasses, they become whatever I wish (from my library). Ideally I could then flip around the blanks and see the content of the books — making it much more like my actual physical workflow. Tl;dr you’re 100% right that the means and method of viewing are critical to what I’m after. But I think the main through line for me is that if I’m having to manipulate the camera AND the content, it leads back to the same issues I currently face. The point for me is being able to interact as I usually do, but with access to “physical” versions of everything I have digital (albeit with digital convenience — such as exif data readily available on the “back” of a photograph). Hope that all makes sense and thanks for treating this so seriously!
  - joshka 5y ago
    Minimal: Every page I visit grab headings (easy) / major themes (harder). Add these to a local searchable db. Type ahead interface showing summary info. Bonus points - automatic summarization (GAN based perhaps?) My Pipe dream... I wonder what the actual quantity of unique text a human actually sees in their lifetime. Could this be easily stored? Like every word I ever read anytime?
blowski 5y ago
I’ve spent more time trying to find a page I wish I’d bookmarked than bookmarking. The friction is so low adding a bookmark, even when I doubt I’ll need it.
basch 5y ago
and like you always mean to someday migrate everything to https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ or https://historio.us/ https://historio.us/ but the task has become so daunting?
ajvs 5y ago
Protip: switch to an outliner with infinite nesting like Dynalist and dump bookmarks in there. You can far more easily categorise, tag and interlink bookmarks that way, and it eventually evolves into a personal wiki almost.
- GaylordTuring 5y ago
  While we're plugging different software solutions for creating indented lists, I would recommend TaskPaper 3 for MacOS. It's a fantastic piece of software that runs natively on Mac.
SloopJon 5y ago
I tend to keep way too many tabs open in my browsers, some of which I never, ever go back and read. Once in a while I dump these evergreen tabs into bookmarks.google.com (yeah, I know), which is just enough to satisfy my inner hoarder that I haven't completely lost whatever was so special about that tab. I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  Hmmm...like a sort of fuzzy IPFS, eh? I don't mean this sarcastically...i lefgitimately think this is a good idea. I knwo they have the wayback machine, etc...but i imagine you mean a more local, personal thing...i like this idea!
- wozacosta 5y ago
  Check out raindrop.io, it features search throughout your bookmarks (even pdf contents are indexed) https://help.raindrop.io/using-search/ https://help.raindrop.io/using-search/
  - nullwarp 5y ago
    Raindrop is one of those just unicorn services for me, fits everything I want.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    Not self-hosted, is it? If its not self-hosted, it doesn't interest me. Also, need a proper way to export data, and need to use an open, specified data format.
    - krageon 5y ago
      You can self-host https://github.com/nextcloud/bookmarks https://github.com/nextcloud/bookmarks
japhyr 5y ago
My bookmarks are roughly broken into two groups - a small set that I go to specifically on a regular basis, and a much larger set that's organized loosely into a long list of folders. I rarely go into my bookmark folders to click on one of these links specifically. The value of that larger set of bookmarks is like a personalized search history. When I search for a topic, I really like knowing whether I've already visited a relevant site. It saves sifting through raw search results for topics that come up a few times a year, or when I work on specific kinds of projects.
mark_h 5y ago
I recently created a daily "random 5 bookmarks" email using GitHub actions and Pinboard's API. I love it; it's a serendipitous reminder of things I once thought were interesting, and now I bookmark things with abandon just so they may show up again. I rarely use bookmarks to find something again because search is still low-friction, but that assumes I know what I'm looking for.
- hanru 5y ago
  This is really a good idea, a new way to consume rotten bookmarks.
63 5y ago
Some time ago I went through my several hundred bookmarks, rooted out link rot, and tagged all of them. The tags have been a godsend for finding high quality resources quickly. Recently I needed materials on C and systems programming and I found the perfect site bookmarked who knows when. My bookmarks are more of a very niche, manual high quality index for searching.
LVB 5y ago
It has become more important to me as search has deteriorated in general. If I find a possibly useful site that isn't SEO-compliant, there is a decent chance I might not be able to find it again if I don't save a link.
- diegoveralli 5y ago
  I scrape all my bookmarks, github / gitlab stars, favorite tweets, etc... regularly, and push that to an elasticsearch instance, so that I can do full text searches later. This is the only reliable way for me to find something I have a vague recollection of, which happens quite often. In the past I used to simply type whatever I could recall into Google search and often find it, but that just doesn't work any more. It's not just the SEO stuff, also the bias towards recent content seems to have increased, and obviously the pace of content generation as well. The haystack is much bigger now than it used to be.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Any public code of the scraping? I’ve been meaning to do something similar.
    - diegoveralli 5y ago
      The code is here: https://github.com/diegov/searchbox https://github.com/diegov/searchbox But don't let its attempt at a friendly README fool you, it's personal-grade software of "works-on-my-machine", and barely, quality. If you want to look at something more polished, I think https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo and https://github.com/thesephist/monocle https://github.com/thesephist/monocle are worth taking a look. Also there's the https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI library, which you could build on, though it mainly relies on data dumps from the different services instead of crawling and fetching through APIs, which is why I didn't use it. Keeping up with API changes is bad enough, I don't want to deal with undocumented dump formats...
wwweston 5y ago
There's a real point here -- not every thing we note will ever have value to us again. OTOH, I taught high school math briefly, and this reminds me of the evergreen question "When are we ever going to use this?" And the honest answer that most students in the classroom will never use more than a tiny portion of the anything they're taught beyond basic algebra (maybe not even that). And yet it's worth doing sometimes because at any given point in life, you don't know exactly what you're going to be or do later. You want to do what is more likely to open doors than close doors later. Even if you learn your HS math well, you probably won't get by on that skill specifically. You'll either train on deeper specifics that HS math gatekept... and/or you'll probably forget enough of it that you'd have to come back and brush up and then get into specific applications. But you'll remember there was such a thing as this kind of problem solving and have some idea of what it entailed and where to find out more. Kindof like a bookmark.
defaultchar 5y ago
I had the same problem. I made this browser add-on to try and fix that... https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-introduction.html https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...
DelightOne 5y ago
Would you run searches over them if you could?
MarcelOlsz 5y ago
+1. Been a pinboard subscriber since the beginning but have legitimately never visited the site once. It is my longest occurring subscription.

I keep making bookmarks, but I don't know why... I never, ever, ever, ever go back and use them. I even think about how I'm not going to use a bookmark as I create it. :-\

codeptualize 5y ago

I gave up, no use. Important work links I know how to find again (I always remember who I send links to on Slack and then I can find them very quickly). I gave up on collecting links, I'm not organized enough, it always turns into an unusable mess.

voltaireodactyl 5y ago

Right there with you. I have this vague dream that one day, the tech will be there to automatically collate and reference all my stored data more easily, sort of like how I work with physical sources. Even as I type this, though, it feels more and more like a pipe dream.

bckr 5y ago
What would be the minimum useful version of this? How do you work with physical sources? What makes you think it's a pipe dream?
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  Working with physical sources = being able to spread ten books out on a table and easily flip between sections in a tactile way (physical pages). That’s really what I mean. For some reason physical objects are much simpler to work with (for me) and opening ten windows (even on a giant screen) just doesn’t work for me the same way. The minimum useful version for me would be something that recognizes all media types AND allows commenting/notes in a standard format that links between them and is easily manageable. In particular that would mean for me: - read/highlight/notate/manage/organize functionality for epubs, PDFs. - import physical books via ISBN and allow me to attach my notes there (ideally with a companion phone app that lets me scan/photograph relevant sections. - photo library (ideally containing the aforementioned book pics while leaving them linked to the notes). - multiple routes for surfacing old stuff. But in all honesty: the reason I think it’s a pipe dream is because I’m fairly certain the limiting factor is being human, not the technology. Like I’m kind of hoping for a new paradigm for digesting media, but I also recognize that’s a pretty steep ask. Relatedly I’ve been trying to build what I’m talking about out of emacs since COVID started, and I get some of the way there by org roam + org noter, but the difficulty of connecting emacs with various work cloud services and such has proved quite daunting. But I’m still at it, because most tools of this nature are dev centric, whereas I’m prose centric, so much of my frustration comes from having tools that are CLOSE but fall apart in the last mile workflow (for my purposes). Honorable mention to hookapp for mac, which I’m still wrapping my head around but may end up solving some of my nicher problem areas.
  - bckr 5y ago
    Thanks for going into detail on that. This makes me wonder if information organization and traversal is truly the killer app of AR + AI. Arrange your data like physical objects. See the connections like literal threads in 3D space. Have a librarian who can actually understand your natural language queries help you find things.
    - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
      For me it absolutely would be. Allow me to interact with my (personal, DRM free, already owned and stored locally) digital media as if it were physical media and you will have my money day one (unless Zuckerberg).
      - bckr 5y ago
        Awesome. Let's go back to "what is the simplest useful implementation"... Let's say you have some static media like PDFs. Let's say you can use VR/AR if you want, but you can also just use your flat screen with a handheld motion controller. Would it be useful to create a 3D world where those PDFs take up space and stay where they're put? Let's say you open an app on your computer that shows you a virtual room, and there's a menu that lets you select a folder from your computer full of PDFs. You open the folder and a pile of physical documents appears as either a stack, a spread, or something messier. Viewing from there would be really important. You'd need to bring the camera in really close to give you the ability to read anything. Or magnifying glasses. Maybe the ability to clone and transform pages and parts of pages while leaving them linked to their parent documents.
        voltaireodactyl 5y ago
        I dig everything you’re saying and think the way forward is something like that. But right now implementations are very limited by screens, in my experience. Like, even if there’s 360 of a virtual space avail to me by dragging the screen, it ends up having the same issues — it seems like, for me, a persistent space is needed. There’s also some research to suggest that having such permanence is helpful to learning — it’s easier to remember info from a physical book because your brain can associate the CONTENT with the actual physical experience of the book itself, which leads to greater retention (I think it’s similar to how mind palaces are meant to function). A mix of AR glasses and physical simulacra is where I expect it to go eventually. As in, I have 10 book “blanks”, and when I use AR glasses, they become whatever I wish (from my library). Ideally I could then flip around the blanks and see the content of the books — making it much more like my actual physical workflow. Tl;dr you’re 100% right that the means and method of viewing are critical to what I’m after. But I think the main through line for me is that if I’m having to manipulate the camera AND the content, it leads back to the same issues I currently face. The point for me is being able to interact as I usually do, but with access to “physical” versions of everything I have digital (albeit with digital convenience — such as exif data readily available on the “back” of a photograph). Hope that all makes sense and thanks for treating this so seriously!
- joshka 5y ago
  Minimal: Every page I visit grab headings (easy) / major themes (harder). Add these to a local searchable db. Type ahead interface showing summary info. Bonus points - automatic summarization (GAN based perhaps?) My Pipe dream... I wonder what the actual quantity of unique text a human actually sees in their lifetime. Could this be easily stored? Like every word I ever read anytime?

blowski 5y ago

I’ve spent more time trying to find a page I wish I’d bookmarked than bookmarking. The friction is so low adding a bookmark, even when I doubt I’ll need it.

basch 5y ago

and like you always mean to someday migrate everything to https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ or https://historio.us/ https://historio.us/ but the task has become so daunting?

ajvs 5y ago

Protip: switch to an outliner with infinite nesting like Dynalist and dump bookmarks in there. You can far more easily categorise, tag and interlink bookmarks that way, and it eventually evolves into a personal wiki almost.

GaylordTuring 5y ago
While we're plugging different software solutions for creating indented lists, I would recommend TaskPaper 3 for MacOS. It's a fantastic piece of software that runs natively on Mac.

SloopJon 5y ago

I tend to keep way too many tabs open in my browsers, some of which I never, ever go back and read. Once in a while I dump these evergreen tabs into bookmarks.google.com (yeah, I know), which is just enough to satisfy my inner hoarder that I haven't completely lost whatever was so special about that tab. I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.

mxuribe 5y ago
Hmmm...like a sort of fuzzy IPFS, eh? I don't mean this sarcastically...i lefgitimately think this is a good idea. I knwo they have the wayback machine, etc...but i imagine you mean a more local, personal thing...i like this idea!
wozacosta 5y ago
Check out raindrop.io, it features search throughout your bookmarks (even pdf contents are indexed) https://help.raindrop.io/using-search/ https://help.raindrop.io/using-search/
- nullwarp 5y ago
  Raindrop is one of those just unicorn services for me, fits everything I want.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Not self-hosted, is it? If its not self-hosted, it doesn't interest me. Also, need a proper way to export data, and need to use an open, specified data format.
  - krageon 5y ago
    You can self-host https://github.com/nextcloud/bookmarks https://github.com/nextcloud/bookmarks

japhyr 5y ago

My bookmarks are roughly broken into two groups - a small set that I go to specifically on a regular basis, and a much larger set that's organized loosely into a long list of folders. I rarely go into my bookmark folders to click on one of these links specifically. The value of that larger set of bookmarks is like a personalized search history. When I search for a topic, I really like knowing whether I've already visited a relevant site. It saves sifting through raw search results for topics that come up a few times a year, or when I work on specific kinds of projects.

mark_h 5y ago

I recently created a daily "random 5 bookmarks" email using GitHub actions and Pinboard's API. I love it; it's a serendipitous reminder of things I once thought were interesting, and now I bookmark things with abandon just so they may show up again. I rarely use bookmarks to find something again because search is still low-friction, but that assumes I know what I'm looking for.

hanru 5y ago
This is really a good idea, a new way to consume rotten bookmarks.

63 5y ago

Some time ago I went through my several hundred bookmarks, rooted out link rot, and tagged all of them. The tags have been a godsend for finding high quality resources quickly. Recently I needed materials on C and systems programming and I found the perfect site bookmarked who knows when. My bookmarks are more of a very niche, manual high quality index for searching.

LVB 5y ago

It has become more important to me as search has deteriorated in general. If I find a possibly useful site that isn't SEO-compliant, there is a decent chance I might not be able to find it again if I don't save a link.

diegoveralli 5y ago
I scrape all my bookmarks, github / gitlab stars, favorite tweets, etc... regularly, and push that to an elasticsearch instance, so that I can do full text searches later. This is the only reliable way for me to find something I have a vague recollection of, which happens quite often. In the past I used to simply type whatever I could recall into Google search and often find it, but that just doesn't work any more. It's not just the SEO stuff, also the bias towards recent content seems to have increased, and obviously the pace of content generation as well. The haystack is much bigger now than it used to be.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Any public code of the scraping? I’ve been meaning to do something similar.
  - diegoveralli 5y ago
    The code is here: https://github.com/diegov/searchbox https://github.com/diegov/searchbox But don't let its attempt at a friendly README fool you, it's personal-grade software of "works-on-my-machine", and barely, quality. If you want to look at something more polished, I think https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo and https://github.com/thesephist/monocle https://github.com/thesephist/monocle are worth taking a look. Also there's the https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI library, which you could build on, though it mainly relies on data dumps from the different services instead of crawling and fetching through APIs, which is why I didn't use it. Keeping up with API changes is bad enough, I don't want to deal with undocumented dump formats...

wwweston 5y ago

There's a real point here -- not every thing we note will ever have value to us again. OTOH, I taught high school math briefly, and this reminds me of the evergreen question "When are we ever going to use this?" And the honest answer that most students in the classroom will never use more than a tiny portion of the anything they're taught beyond basic algebra (maybe not even that). And yet it's worth doing sometimes because at any given point in life, you don't know exactly what you're going to be or do later. You want to do what is more likely to open doors than close doors later. Even if you learn your HS math well, you probably won't get by on that skill specifically. You'll either train on deeper specifics that HS math gatekept... and/or you'll probably forget enough of it that you'd have to come back and brush up and then get into specific applications. But you'll remember there was such a thing as this kind of problem solving and have some idea of what it entailed and where to find out more. Kindof like a bookmark.

defaultchar 5y ago

I had the same problem. I made this browser add-on to try and fix that... https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-introduction.html https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...

DelightOne 5y ago

Would you run searches over them if you could?

MarcelOlsz 5y ago

+1. Been a pinboard subscriber since the beginning but have legitimately never visited the site once. It is my longest occurring subscription.