deciphering my past self

[ans99]

i'm starting to realize how utterly useless web browser bookmarks are, because no matter how meticulously i organize them, i inevitably end up just junking them in the main bookmarks folder because it's loads faster than combing through the intricate folder system i've set up (i have a lot of bookmarks, yes). periodically i try to clean out the old ones but in this case i think it's been since 2006-- and apparently due to our growing fast lane tech age it's been long enough that some of the webpages (*gasp*) don't even exist anymore. more often though i'm just left wondering why the hell i ever bookmarked some of this shit in the first place.

i think perhaps i was reading this detailed article about educational malpractice as homework for my teaching seminar, back in the days when i was enthusiastic and so sure i was going to be an awesome TA-- y'know, right before i got my dreams crushed-- but i find it's almost impossible to say for sure. it doesn't even look familiar to me.

and why on earth was i ever interested enough in binary systems to actually bookmark a page on them?

at some point i guess i must have wanted under cabinet lighting, though i really don't remember what that was all about.

finally there's a webpage for www.utopiaexperiment.com, which doesn't exist. perhaps it referred to this utopia experiment? if that's the case did i bookmark it simply because i wish i'd been there? who knows?

Comments

[freyja.livejournal.com]

i don't even know what that is!

[nom-de-grr.livejournal.com]

It's a web-based social bookmarking system, i.e., you save your bookmarks to your delicious page rather than to your computer, making it as portable as your Internet access. It also allows you to organize your bookmarks by tags. The bookmarking process can be facilitated by a browser plug-in that makes it very easy to save links and tag them, and delicious automatically provides suggested and popular tags to choose from. Other people can browse your delicious bookmarks, hence the "social" aspect, though what you make publicly available is up to you. Furthermore, the links that you can discover by searching delicious are often of a higher quality than those you might find via google, because the results have been hand-selected by users, rather than found by algorithm.

I am a big fan of Delicious for academic reasons: I believe that the delicious model represents the apotheosis of user-generated natural language search, and I think it has the potential to make controlled vocabularies and expert-created classification systems obsolete. Because an enormous community of delicious users collectively determine the tags that are associated with links, the language that describes the link is what real people will use to search, and the tags are flexible and can easily change their meaning over time, depending on how the community assigns tags. Unlike, say, the Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are essentially fixed and become outdated and may not even represent how people really search. See how awesome the Delicious model can be if its applied to books instead of links? This is what LibraryThing does, and I totally think it's the future of library science.

[freyja.livejournal.com]

hmmm, maybe i should check this out then (that and librarything, which i've heard a lot about from various people).

thanks!

[nom-de-grr.livejournal.com]

No problemo. Here are the links for the browser add-ons, which I highly recommend:

http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/firefox
http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/ie

[penguin42.livejournal.com]

aw, they aren't using the del.icio.us domain anymore :(