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Ideas that have been beaten to death

ruky.me

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Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#81

Post by kwhitefoot »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #68
jhkiehna wrote: post #64

He states that bookmarks in browsers are "broken" but doesn't elaborate. I've never felt this way, Anyone know what he's talking about?

My biggest issue is that they don't interoperate across browsers. The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy. I don't use a single browser on one device on any of the devices I use. If the browsers treated themselves less like silos, people would be more encouraged to use them for this sort of note taking.

Should be easy to fix. Firefox already shares such data with other Firefox instances on other devices. And a UI to export the bookmarks is already present, so exporting to other browsers should be easy to automate.

But, I use Firefox everywhere except for one Android table that because of Google stupidity/cupidity/rapaciousness doesn't have room to install Firefox even though it has a nearly empty 128 GB SD card.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#82

Post by kwhitefoot »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #43
dkersten wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with bookmarking has always been that they quickly become just as unwieldy as not having things bookmarked, so finding a bookmarked item becomes really difficult. Plus I forget what I have bookmarked so when I want to read a thing again I don’t think to check the bookmarks. So I’ve largely stopped using them and just use it as a giant “to browse through again eventually” list instead.

Haha totally. I don’t bookmark anything anymore. I use Pocket so that if ever I’m out of network I’ve got a collection of interesting articles to read but rarely remember to do that either.

I use the SingeFileZ Firefox extension to save pages that I want to be sure of being able to read again.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#83

Post by tconfrey »

reactspa wrote: post #27

100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game. I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it. I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now. Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me. I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as ps…

If you are interested, check out my bookmarker extension BrainTool. For #3 BT makes it easy to save pages into a folder hierarchy with autocomplete and a tree view. All saved items have associated text notes (which could be #tags) and everything is incrementally searchable, approximating #1 and #4.

#2 is an interesting, I'll think about it!

This short video gives you the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kg9yVMMAM&list=PLhaw8BE1ki...

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#84

Post by zenkat »

hliyan wrote: post #77

My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.

But Google indexes the whole web. I want a search that works just over the articles I've read.

"What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it .

Google is useless in these situations. I need an index contained by my prior search history. Had anyone built this yet?

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#85

Post by TrailMixRaisin »

timoth3y wrote: post #65

Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine. What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do. We don't know why we really make those bookmarks. Boo…

I think you describe the real problem here. For me I just skip the bookmarking part. If I want to come back to something later, I just leave the tab open. This was a good solution because 2-3 years ago there came an inevitable browser crash and all the open tabs were lost. If you could not remember them, they most likely are not that important.

Unfortunately these hard resets do not occur any more. So I have to close the tabs that I find not that interesting after some days. But closing tabs is much easier than deleting old bookmarks. I assume this is, because you have not commited yourself that much.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#86

Post by jasode »

timoth3y wrote: post #65

Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine. What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do. We don't know why we really make those bookmarks. Boo…

>What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. [...] We don't know why we really make those bookmarks.

I think a lot of us do know why we save bookmarks. I think your point depends on equating bookmarks with a "future todo reading list". (Similar concept: https://www.google.com/search?q=tsundoku)

But a more complete taxonomy of bookmarks:

- (1) saved urls for often visted websites like weather, status pages, etc. This saves time from having to recreate the google searches that finally lead you to that url or you found a deep url that bypasses a bunch of clicks.

- (2) an archival "memory" of urls you already read that may be referenced later. The bookmarks are not a "todo list" because the content has already been read. However, a future piece of information may make a connection back to some of them. The personal url archive acts as a more manageable subset of the entire web for reference.

- (3) a future reading list. Bookmarks are an alternative to opening up 100 tabs on the browser to read later

Most of my "bookmarks" are category (2) but I just save the urls in a text file instead of using a bookmark manager. For the really important references, I try to save as mhtml local files.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#87

Post by elb2020 »

I feel that the solution to this would be some kind of generic online storage solution. Like Excel, but for the whole web, where you can put any kind of data in, get an address (a web-ified pointer) to it, and be sure that you can look it up again at any time, from anywhere, using the address key.

A generic online storage system with Excel-like properties.

If that existed, then people would use it for bookmarks, and probably also for a host of other types of online storage needs.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#88

Post by zenkat »

sodimel wrote: post #15
bryans wrote: post #14

The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can…

> you can just as easily google for I can't find most of the links I saved by using a search engine, and I think that's part of the problem.

100% this.

I casually read a huge amount of interesting technical/business info on the web. But when I want to use that knowledge later (say in a business presentation or technical design), it's nearly impossible to find the original webpage! I can remember the basic idea, but I can't turn it into search terms that are precise enough for Google. ("What was the name of that programming law about tearing down fences?")

What I want is the ability to constrain my searches by pages I've personally visited. Even better would be able to "star" pages to say "this is good, rank higher in future personal searches".

Has anyone built that yet? Why or why not?

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#89

Post by benlumen »

I don't know about everyone else, but I usually bookmark to read later. I built a simple bookmarking webapp for this while in university over 10 years ago, pre-Pocket, even.

The thing is, I usually don't read it later.

Next time you bookmark something to read later, or send it to yourself, or whatever you do - maybe stop and ask: am I actually ever going to open this again?

Chances are you're reading articles to procrastinate, and if it's too long or not interesting enough to read even then, bookmarking it is just procrastinating on the procrastination.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#90

Post by lewisjoe »

timoth3y wrote: post #65

Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine. What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do. We don't know why we really make those bookmarks. Boo…

You are right. But the reason is not because we are broken. It is because our tools are not intelligent enough to compliment our tendency to forget. I didn't find a single bookmarking system that reminded me of links I wanted to read later.

I wrote this as a manifesto - https://github.com/joelewis/readmelater and later went on to build a version of that vision not because I wanted to beat that idea to death, but just to scratch my own itch.

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