Now what happened to my bookmarks?

[If you came here trying to recover lost bookmarks for Firefox, mozillazine.org has a knowledge base article on the topic. For Chrome, try this Google search. For IE, try this Google search. For Safari, try this one. For Opera, try this one. The Opera search also turned up this PC Today article for Firefox, IE and Opera. For Ma.gnolia (FaceBook and maybe others?), try this. In any case, please feel free to have a look around since you're here.]

About a year ago I wondered what had happened to my bookmarks. It wasn't that they'd disappeared, but they'd certainly become less prominent in my web.life. I had also just started using deli.cio.us to track bookmarks out in the cloud instead of on my local box.

I noted that most of what I'd been using bookmarks for -- remembering frequently-visited sites and navigating the web at large -- had been subsumed by my browser's history feature and toolbars, and by Google search. My actual bookmarks (and deli.cio.us) were mainly for remembering memorable sites that I might not revisit enough to keep fresh in the broswer's memory.

Since then I've updated my browser, at which point the deli.cio.us plugin I'd been using stopped working. Rather than track that down, I thought I'd see if I missed it first. I didn't. In fact, months later I still haven't fixed it. My actual browser bookmarks list has slowly grown but I'm not sure when I actually used it last. At least the links are there if I ever want them (unless they've rotted away in the mean time).

My browser also grew a "smart bookmarks" feature with the update, which automagically collects a reasonable facsimile of what I actually visit frequently. I'm sure there's some annoying technical reason that it misses a couple of frequently-visisted sites, but I can't be bothered to track it down. I think I see the smart bookmarks as a sort of freebie. If it helps, great, otherwise no big deal.

Maybe this is just my slowly attaining my career goal of "curmudgeon", but I'm finding myself more and more indifferent to Web 2.0 in general. Some of the AJAX stuff is nice, but some of I can just as well do without (like this). There's also a larger drawback to the whole approach: Anything that encourages widespread customization also encourages widespread quirks, glitches (like this), bugs and maddeningly not-quite-identical behavior of functionally identical pieces across sites (or even within a site).

Tagging seemed fun and useful, but I hardly ever use it except to revisit a tag for this blog for use in a new post (as I did with annoyances just now). I think I find more value in the exercise of figuring out which tags to put on an entry. Of course if that helps you, dear reader, I'm more than glad to help.

Social networking is its own little world. I've certainly written about it a fair bit, but again I don't make frequent use of it. My LinkedIn account isn't completely dormant, but the joint is not exactly jumpin' either. What else was Web 2.0 supposed to be? Microformats? I played with them at one point, I think.

This is not to suggest that Web 2.0 is mere hype -- obviously lots of people use the stuff and like it -- just to say that nothing has really changed my position that while Web 1.0 was a grand slam home run, Web 2.0 is more a bunch of singles. And probably a fair number of foul balls. They won't strike you out, but they don't do much else for you either.

However, thinking all this over, I did notice one more place that bookmarks for interesting sites ended up, and it's in the cloud, no less. A great many interesting sites that I run across that would previously have sat quietly in my browser's bookmarks find their way into this blog where everyone can find them. Of course that means I can, too, and from time to time I do. Is blogging considered Web 2.0 per se? I forget, but if it is I'd consider it one of the more successful examples. Maybe a ground-rule double?

What happened to my bookmarks?

[If you came here trying to recover lost bookmarks for Firefox, mozillazine.org has a knowledge base article on the topic. For Chrome, try this Google search. For IE, try this Google search. For Safari, try this one. For Opera, try this one. The Opera search also turned up this PC Today article for Firefox, IE and Opera. For Ma.gnolia (FaceBook and maybe others?), try this. In any case, please feel free to have a look around since you're here.]

Oh they're still there, but the thing is I care less and less. Just how did that happen?

Back when Firefox was Netscape, I spent a fair bit of time grooming my bookmarks list -- checking for broken links, sorting them, organizing them into folders, making sure they followed me from machine to machine. Now not so much. I'm only starting to use del.icio.us, so I'll have to report later on what effect that might have, but it seems more slanted towards finding cool new things as opposed to old lost things.

What changed? A couple of things.

First, browsers got smarter. Firefox (and others) will remember where you've been recently. To get to my banking site, I have to type "b-a-" into the bar at the top and then hit down arrow a couple of times. This is at least as easy as browsing through my bookmarks, even if I put my banking site at the top (at the expense of whatever else), probably because it works regardless of whether I made a particular effort to remember the site or not.

For news sources, I have RSS/Atom/whatever it is these days. Other interesting sites install themselves in the tool bar and look more like applications than web sites.

That pretty much takes care of the "remember frequently-visited sites" function. If it's frequently-visited, it's in the browser's memory pretty much by definition. If it's particularly well-used, it's probably hooked into the browser one way or the other.

Which leads me to the other bookmark-killer: Google. Early on, I sort of remember thinking that the useful web was mainly a smallish set of known sites and it was up to me to remember what to find where. In such a world it makes sense to use the otherwise memory-impaired early browser's bookmark feature to collect the main portals to the known world. Early search engines also had a higher chaff/wheat ratio than modern ones, discouraging their use somewhat.

These days I accept that I have only a dim idea of what's out there. If I want to find out about something I do what everyone does: put together a couple of search terms likely to nail it down and set Google at it (or Wikipedia, depending).

Google was probably what finally really convinced me that "dumb is smarter" could work in a big way. There's still value in hand-selected indexes and summaries, which is really what a bookmark list is, and the whole Web 2.0-style collaborative tagging thing definitely has value, but a comprehensive, frequently updated search engine will win on coverage and agility every time. That sets a reasonably high bar for anything else.

Like browser history, searching works without any explicit help. I could try to remember whether the Murky News is sanjosemercurynews.com (nope) or mercurynews.com (the actual domain) or sanjosemercury.com (redirects). I could bookmark it and find the bookmark. Or I could just Google "san jose mercury" and get it.

Searches also don't go stale. Bookmarks tend to rot over time as things get reshuffled and relocated, even though the document itself is still out there somewhere. I'm not yet sure how adaptive tags can be. Having one's site prominently tagged will tend to discourage one from moving it.

If bookmarks are not that useful in remembering frequently-visited sites or as a starting point for research, what are they good for? For my money there is one core function they still perform well, namely remembering particularly memorable pages, things you're glad you found but probably won't be revisiting on a daily basis.

I do use bookmarks (and now del.iciou.us) for that, though I don't find myself referring to them much. That's probably because I just don't find myself wanting to replay the greatest hits very much. There's too much interesting new stuff on the web. Old bookmarks are more for rainy days, and it hasn't been raining much lately.