Bookmarking Solutions: Quick Access vs. Long Term Storage

Few things in this world are as useful as social bookmarking. However, few things are as complicated, frustrating, and tedious as social bookmarking.

I just contradicted myself! How is this possible? And is that a bad thing?

A Cursed wealth of Bookmarking Riches

In the article Nine Notable Uses For Social Bookmarking, I described a number of ways to use bookmarks to help you organize your information, even to the point of suggesting that you might want to use different bookmarking applications for different subject areas. This flexibility is a testament to the power of social bookmarking.

However, some of the functions of social bookmarking do have a cost. To mangle a phrase from Ben Parker (Spider-Man’s deceased uncle), “with great power comes great complexity”. Social bookmarking allows you to use a combination of tags, folders, notes, and rating systems to index and classify the websites that you want to keep for future reference. You can classify and organize websites with almost unlimited power and flexibility. It’s a perfect tool for linking together related websites for retrieval at some point in the future.

The problem is that searching through tags, folders, and comments is time consuming if you need something quickly. Maybe you have a favorite website of sports statistics that you want to check regularly. Perhaps you need to check stock market quotes every fifteen minutes. How about a quick link to your blog, message board, or instant messenger software? Advanced social bookmarking will make it possible to store many related website links, but it can take a number of clicks and keystrokes to find them. At the same time, you might need to track twenty or more websites by several authors on several topics for a research project. In the latter scenario, the indexing abilities of social bookmarking really pay dividends.

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Need It Today vs. Need It Someday

Is there a way to balance the needs of quick access and comprehensive indexing? I think the answer is to have two types of bookmarking solutions: easy access and long term storage. Let’s look at a real world system that helps illustrate this point.

Bookmarks can be used like a standard filing system, whether your files are paper-based or electronic. Filing systems are usually divided into two types of storage: short term and long term. Short term storage is used to house the information that you need at your fingertips, like current project files, phone directories, contact lists, and so on. Any files that need to be used hourly, daily, or weekly belong in short term storage and should be close to you for easy access. This information is very important for you to do your work, but it might have limited value for anyone else.

Long term storage, which is sometimes kept in a different filing cabinet, different room, or different building, is designed for the documents that you need to store for months, years, or even permanently. A robust tagging or indexing system can be used to keep track of this kind of information that must be kept, but won’t be used very often.

Now back to the Web. The paper filing systems analogy applies nicely to bookmarking systems. Social bookmarking, however, is not only good for long term storage, it’s also designed to share useful bookmarks with other people.

I’d summarize these bookmarking needs in the following way:

Quick Access – links to resources that meet your personal needs, particularly speed and ease of use (e.g. applications that you use regularly).

Long Term Storage – links to static (unchanging or rarely changed) resources that you need to index for retrieval over the long term, either for personal use or for public use (e.g. reference materials, FAQs, journals, articles, etc.)

Why Use A Sledgehammer To Drive A Small Nail?

Tradesmen will use similar, but distinctly different tools depending on the job. You don’t use a tiny chisel to rip up pavement. By the same token, a jackhammer is overkill for woodworking – in fact, it would probably ruin any delicate piece of work In this vein, I recommend using separate bookmarking applications to distinguish between the two types of bookmarks:

Quick Access: Use the bookmarking functions within your browser to store your quick-reference bookmarks. It’s easy to set them up in a Links folder or else you can drag them onto a blank toolbar for quick access. You can’t get much faster than single-click retrieval of a needed resource. If you want to keep quick reference bookmarks in a Web application for maximum portability and flexibility, I recommend Google Bookmarks. They are easy to save and reuse when you have the Google Toolbar installed.

Long Term Storage: Use any of the robust and popular social bookmarking solutions for your long term storage. Many people use Del.icio.us for social bookmarking. Ma.gnolia and Netvouz are just a couple of other examples of this type of application.

Use The Right Tool For The Job

The next time you find a cool website that you want to find again, stop and think about it for a moment. Do you want to use it every day or do you need to keep it for long term usage? The answer to this question will determine the right bookmarking solution to use.