Using a personal wiki for bookmark organization
Bookmarks have been around since the earliest browsers. With years I’ve accumulated thousands of them, and I’ve heard of similar numbers from other people. As it grows, it becomes obvious some organization is needed.
The organization scheme that comes naturally, at first, is folders. Those have been there since the early beginnings with Adam and Eve when the Web was young and domain names were aplenty in the tree of TLDs. That’s what I relied on for about six thousand years, and it became a huge mess. I still have old folders from my antique “classification system” I never look at anymore except for quick-and-easy nostalgia.
Tags and multiple axis for classification
So it quickly becomes obvious more axis are needed to classify. The most self-evident case is when doing a project: you’ll quickly accumulate a bunch of links which are contextually related because of the project, but otherwise would end up in different categories.
For example, if you’re creating a web site on video games, you accumulate links on, say, Nintendo, HTML, marketing and Ramen noodles, but in the Grand Scheme of Things (ie. Dewey classification, or some directory like dmoz.org), these are not usually put together.
So you end up trying to set up some keyword/tag system, hack together for 20 hours some frail Firefox extension, and then Firefox 3 comes along and does it for you anyway. The end result is you can create a tag for your project, yet also tag with proper general categories.
With a personal wiki
But in my experience that still doesn’t work, based on the fact that I never look at the bookmarks again, except when I have a very precise idea of what I’m looking for. And then there’s Google anyway.
In fact, currently, I only use local bookmarks for
- Transition until I put them in my wiki;
- pages and sites I use all the time, so I need quick access (online tools etc.).
Why is it that my old bookmarks were still condemned to live unfullfillingly in the dark for eons? There are many reasons, but the main one, for me, was that bookmarks don’t offer any formatting options and their context is not rich enough, even with tags or folders.
When you write a blog post or wiki entry, you can use context, explanations, and the links make sense. They’re part of the text, and when you look back at the entry, you don’t just see a list of equally-created bookmarks, but each has its place and the content you summarize, the description you make create a whole, and of course it’s text so you can have sections, bullet points, images and whatnot.
So my current system is one where I put my bookmarks in wiki entries related to their topic, with some summary explaining why it’s there and what I extracted from it, if I read it. If I need more axis, I’ve developed a WikidPad extension to tag a part of a page.
It seems to work: I reuse the links much more often, and it actually creates value for me as the content slowly grows with the links and knowledge instead of just being an anonymous bunch of pointers.
Of course it requires a bit more work for each link, but in the end if you’re not willing to spend 30 seconds writing a quick note, perhaps it wasn’t worth bookmarking anyway.
Ahmed:
Sounds great. I fell in love with wikidPad a couple of weeks ago. Thank you very much!
28 November 2008, 7:10 pmDan:
I really enjoyed reading through the above. It’s something that I was silently thinking myself for some time but didn’t admit to myself: bookmarking by itself is indeed useless, you never return to those bookmarks but instead prefer to search Google for the same thing next time.
I see you found an ingenious way to solve the situation by using a wiki but I’m a bit curious of an actual example to see how you organized categories, pages, etc. – if possible, if I’m not asking too much you could create another blog post with that – it would be enlightening at least for me.
In my current process I use a mindmap(freemind), start with a center topic of interest, and through the research I find lots of links that relate to that topic. While I do the research and realize the need for new things I mark them down in that mindmap. Then I do research on those actions, find new links and so on. In the end I get a big(if not huge) mindmap with lots of links related to that topic.
The issue I’m facing with my system is re-finding, re-usability and cross-referencing.
Maybe one or more links(url) that I collected during the research of the above topic could have been used in multiple mindmaps(topics) but since I read the infos in that link specifically to solve the problem I had with the first topic, I forget that in the link was a solution that could also be used to solve something from the second topic(mindmap). This is when I duplicate the link address into the second mindmap. In the end, I can’t backtrack the process by starting at the link, and seeing what relates to it: what research I’ve done where it was usefull.
Re-finding is also another issue. The research I do in those mindmaps is very specific/related to a target I have in mind: for example “improving my knowledge system” which is what I’m doing right now by asking you all these questions
– hope you won’t mind. Say I’d save a reference to the emails between us and the blog post in that research/mindmap. However, in your blog you also wrote about another topic that sounds like: “social bookmarking is useless by itself”. This topic contributes to the “improving my knowledge system” but after some time passes I’d ask myself: “I’d like to see all my research related to social bookmarking” and here’s the moment when all stops – I can’t search tenths of mindmaps to find where I talked/researched about bookmarks.
Also, integration is another issue. I tend to write in my mindmaps also the outcome of the research. At some point later I’d like to see what I did chronologically and then I start to ask myself: why didn’t I put those outcomes in a blog? But then again, I think: “if I were to put them in a blog then I’d be duplicating data, writing both in mindmap and the blog of what I did and that’s just slooow”
I know that using a wiki could improve this case by using a search tool. However, when using a wiki the process is slower than with a mindmap where you brainstorm things very fast and that’s why at this point I tend to use mindmaps. Also, if you make research for the above “improving my knowledge system” task in a wiki and write a page on this and include links to various resources then those links would become stuck in that page. If there’s another task where that link could prove usefull, you won’t know.
I wrote too much for a comment, but I needed to share my experience with these tools in the hope of finding a solution out of it.
Have a excellent day and lots of productivity,
Dan.
29 June 2010, 9:18 amFrancois:
Hi Dan,
I’m glad you found some interesting insight in this blog post. I think out of the (more or less) new ideas I introduce in the blog, this is probably the most useful: replacing bookmarking with integration in a wiki. As I said in the post, I almost never use bookmarks these days except as a “waiting for classification” area (and, to be precise, for 1) some links/tools I use regularly and 2) some sites I don’t so much care about except temporarily).
Wikis and mindmaps share an important trait: the connectivity (graphs). But I feel wikis, by allowing free text, offer me more flexibility to express information in all sorts of ways. I find mindmaps constraining in this regard. You mention speed of mind maps: this is the reason I use Wikidpad in Edit mode, I never have to go back and forth between Edit and Preview mode, so it’s as fast as using a text editor.
I think there’s one common thread in the problems you just wrote about: the “project-specificness” of each mind map you create (ie. each mind map is used for a specific _problem_). I also have project-specific wiki pages, but, and that’s an important point, I will as much as possible add information to “topic-centric” pages, not “project-centric”. The project page, at the top, will link to topics that relate to the project.
The reason I do this is that more often than not a topic will concern many projects, and vice-versa. So say I have project1 and project2, topics topic1, topic2, topic3, topic4. You might have, at the top of the project pages, the following links:
project1: topic1, topic2, topic3
project2: topic2, topic3, topic4
In the project pages, I’ll add the information that’s very specific to the project (ideas on how to go about it, etc.). Generic information on a topic goes in the topic page. Therefore if another project also relates to that topic, it simply has to link to that topic page.
(Examples might be useful. Example projects with pages: “create a blog theme”, “create a site for university project X”. Example topics: “css”, “html”, “wordpress themes”, “university course Y”. Concerning courses, btw: I create a page for them, but add the information to a page that’s not course-centric. Ie. if I have course INFO3820 on networks, I have a page “INFO3820″, but most information goes on the “Networks” wiki page).
I might someday post some example of a wiki page, but I think to do it properly it’ll require some work, as a good example will show how the page evolves and will illustrate some decisions about where I put what. The most common type (and important) of decision is that project/topic thing, I think.
Oh, another point concerning the mindmap/wiki difference: in Wikis, I won’t enter only links. I’ll add information digested from those links (ie. free text, lots of bullet points, subsections, notes on concepts, equations…). I feel neither bookmarks nor mindmaps allow me to really dump the knowledge clutter that otherwise accumulates in my mind, like free text does.
Hope that helps and I’m glad these ideas stroke a chord in someone as concerned as I am about making his knowledge organization a bit less chaotic
1 July 2010, 7:30 am