I’ve been cleaning up my PC’s desktop and the countless nested “dump” folders that contain all the junk from the desktop, stored at some point in the past. Most of the stuff is links that have been dragged to the desktop from a browser window. Occasionally the links are something I’ve stumbled across, but in most cases they’re the result of myself having been researching one topic or another. The links that have some kind of loose correlation tend to be grouped on the desktop (I have two monitors so there’s plenty of desktop space to be cluttered). Periodically I become tired with the cluttered desktop, create a new “dump” folder and dump everything from the desktop into that folder. Often this includes a previous “dump” folder (which contains several levels more of “dump” folders).
Over the years I’ve tried various solutions for storing the links. The browsers’ built-in “favorites” lists are completely inadequate; I generally store just the real favorites in them — sites that I actually do visit frequently and repeatedly. More links I’ve stored for later reference are stored in the Link Resource which I started several years back. However, maintaining such a monstrous list takes effort and despite of occasional run with Web Link Validator, the list is bound to contain links that have in some way or another expired. I also use Linkman, which was recently updated, but whose user interface is starting to look rather arcane. I find that I rather seldom actually access links that I have stored in Linkman (and there are many). In most cases I use Google, but on occasion there’s a resource that I know I’ve been to in the past, but that I can’t find anywhere. In such times I go hunting in my link archives, and sometimes the effort produces a result.
I think it’s weird there is no better solution for storing links. Most everyone who is using the web these days needs to store links. Yet both IE and Firefox have a fairly unsophisticated built-in link managers. My wife has been experimenting with Google Bookmarks, but while it would often be handy to have access to one’s bookmarks regardless of the location, Google doesn’t provide a much better way to organize the links than, say, Linkman.
Considering that my preferred way of storing links resulting from researching the web appears to be to drag them into “visual” groups on my desktop, perhaps some kind of program that would allow the links to be organized and placed visually onto some sort of pages, or folders, would suit the bill. Maybe something like that already exists, but as of yet I haven’t come across it.
But there could be a better solution to the problem! In the future, “storing links” will probably be so last century. It is, after all, Google’s plan to replace links simply with web searching, and for the most part this has already happened. However, sometimes, for example, a solution to a programming problem is discovered by following archived bulletin board discussions. The final page containing the key piece of information is not the one that came up in any of the searches. If I don’t bookmark that page or otherwise store the information found on it, I may or may not find it in the future. But what if it was possible to add a custom “meta tag” to the page? Let’s say I’d write “Solution to the programming problem X.” Now the next time I personally would be looking for information about that specific issue, that page would come up in the search even if the original poster didn’t realize the information she provided would actually resolve the seemingly unrelated problem I was researching a solution for. Maybe this technology could be called Wikitags.