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More Tagging, Less Bookmarking

I had a little spare time tonight so I decided to do a job that I’ve been meaning to do for a while… cleaning up my bookmarks collection. (What’s up with that? I can live in a house that’s messy, my desk at work looks like a bomb has hit it, but my hard drive is really well organised… go figure!)

I mentioned recently that I’ve been using Flock as my main browser these days… mainly because it has a bunch of wonderful built-in features that seem really sensible, but I can’t help wondering why the bookmark organisation is set up like it is. One of the many nice things about Firefox, or even IE for that matter, is that you can arrange your collection of bookmarks/favourites into folders and subfolders. This is largely a very good thing, although I did notice I tended to get just a little over-organised at times and I had a large number of folders that had only one item in them, which is perhaps getting just a tad granular.

But I did have a lot of top-level folders with subfolders in them and it was, by and large, quite well organised.  So for example, in the folder labeled “Education”, there were subfolders for, say, “Literacy”, “Contructivism”. “Gifted Education”, and so on. The problem was that I often tended to forget what I put in these folders, and that sometimes I would find an interesting site and go to bookmark it for later use without realising I already had a sub folder catergory set up that was suitable. Over time, this led to quite a bit of duplication and disarray.

Flock however, does not support this subfoldering approach. Although Flock can imports bookmarks directly from Firefox, when you go to the bookmark organiser you only get a top-level folder for each category you imported, (including the stuff that was originally in subfolders).  In other words, every folder, no matter what level it was when it was imported, now becomes a top-level folder. This meant I ended up with LOTS of top level folders, in fact way too many to be sensibly managed. I’ve been spending some time tonight going through them and realising that many bookmarks have been linkrotted, some are just plain irrelevant, and most can be found quicker on Google than I can find them in my bookmark collection.

I’m finding that Google has changed the need to bookmark everything. If I want to find a site that I am after, it’s usually a simpler proposition just to Google it.

I’m also learning that tagging a bookmark is generally better than filing it, but I must admit I’m still really just starting to get my head around the tagging concept. I mean, I get it, but I’m still figuring out excatly how to organise things to get the best leverage out of the tagging system.

The really big plus for using Flock as my browser is that it has a very seamless integration with del.icio.us, so I can  bookmark both locally AND to the web. Firefox can do the same sort of thing by using an Add-On, but I do like the way it’s organised right inside of Flock.. that, and the built in Flickr uploader and web clippings make it a really useful tool.

Edublogs now has a neat plugin tool that lets me embed my del.icio.us feed directly to this blog page. I’ve currently added it as the last webpart on the right column, so scroll down a bit and you can see a list of the last few sites I’ve bookmarked. I’m not sure why sharing my favourite websites with the world is a good thing, but I guess I’ll do it anyway.

Anyway, I’m off to figure out how tagging works!

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Not even scratching the Surface

Ok, I must admit I’m impressed by Microsoft’s new table-like project called Surface, which Bill G has been showing off lately. It’s a multitouch capable computer that works in a table form factor. There are some obvious uses of it, like restaurants, casinos, etc where transactions take place largely on a table. I don’t know how commercially successful it will be but I think it’s a pretty cool technology!

Watch the video and check it out for yourself…  I particularly like the way it interacts with devices like digital cameras and PDAs.  I presume those devices would have to have some form of wireless interconnectivity such as Bluetooth or Wifi?  Very cool though!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5yJ3x9XNFK8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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These Boots were made for Walking

Leader Article on MS Walk

I blogged recently about my effort to raise funds for MS research by taking part in the MS Walk and Fun Run here in Sydney. Thanks to a great deal of support from friends, family and workmates I’ve managed to raise a decent amount of money for this great cause.

The people from MS Australia rang me recently to ask if I’d be prepared to do an interview with the local newspaper to help promote the event and naturally I said yes. So one of the journos from my local paper rang me at work the other day to ask a few questions, and organise a photographer to come by my house.

The angle I suggested to the journo was that I was really impressed by the online tools provided by MS Australia, such as the fundraising websites that are created when you register for the event, and that one of the reasons I have been able to raise as much as I have was due to the connections and tools that the Internet enables. I pointed out that many of my friends and aquaintances from the Blogosphere have been responsible for a lot of the support I’ve received so far and so a good angle on the story was how technology can be an enabler that lets us be more effective. I suppose they hinted at this angle in the article, but it’s pretty tenuous. Anyway, that was the general idea I was suggesting.

My local paper is caller The Leader, and although they do a fairly good job of reporting local news, they have a habit of sometimes only getting the facts close-to-correct (and hence are sometimes referred to as The Mis-Leader). So in the interests of more accurate journalism, I just wanted to correct a few almost-facts…

1) It was my friend’s mum, not my mum’s friend, but yes I really do have a friend whose mother died of MS. However, it was a very long time ago, not just “a few years”… it was more like 20+ years. That friend made a very generous sponsorship of this event, so I just wanted to set that fact right out of respect for his mum.

2) The people from Canada and Chicago who sponsored me are very dear friends, and not “strangers”, as the article suggests. Yes I did get support from a number of people who I have never met other than through the blogosphere, but my North American connections are certainly not strangers.

And the address for my sponsorship page is http://sydney.mswalk.org.au/?betchaboy if you still want to help me hit my goal of $2000. 🙂  I’m pretty close!!