Dudley Browse-A-Lot

Whether through vocation or predilection, many of us actively research topics and interests on the internet. Some of us even try to keep track of what we discover with the crazy idea that we may actually need this again or will use it in the future. And we might, but maybe not the way we think.

Case in point: Dudley Browse-A-Lot. Once a happy go lucky chap, Dudley is now worried he might be sliding down a slippery slope as the sheer number of his bookmarks starts tilting his monitor ever so slightly forward with the accumulated weight of their pixel density. At first, like most noobs, he had a short, handy list of important stuff. But soon this grew into a longer ticker tape of all kinds of stuff. Luckily he discovered he could create folders for his bookmarks. Problem solved he thought. Shortly thereafter, however, he discovered he had grown another long ticker tape list, this time of folders, each of which contained their own an equally long ticker tape of bookmarks. Like the blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse.Made of ticker tape. (I just like to say that word.)

Sadly, now whenever he clicks "bookmark" and selects a folder or sub-folder, a sinking feeling wells up in the pit of his stomach. A feeling that it's likely to be the last time he will ever see this link, so what's the point? Oh sure, he'll remember vaguely that he'd seen something about juju beans, and he'd even bookmarked it, but when confronted with the thicket of folders he wouldn't know whether it was under vegetables, funny names, story ideas or things it would be cool to can. And with hundreds of links in each folder to sort through, he was just recreating the internet, at a more personally annoying scale. After a few minutes of fruitless digging, he'd probably end up on back on google trying to find juju beans with another search. Great, another thousand links to sort through.

The context that made sense when he filed juju beans in the 'not-rhubarb' folder, may have little to do with the state of mind he's in when he's looking for it. Psychologists call this 'state specific memory', which is why sometimes when you lose your keys when you're drunk, the only way to find them again is to get drunk.

Dudley needs to step up his game before he acquires a drinking problem.

Technology is just a big dog-chasing-tail game of problems it creates and solutions it proffers to resolve them. Sometimes this actually results in forward momentum, in a Tasmanian devil sort of way.

Two tools and approaches might rescue Dudley at this stage.

Evernote

This software is basically a notebook on steroids. It comes in a free and paid version, the paid version allows you to sync notebooks to smart phones and tablets. Both versions allow you to create local notebooks on your computer. (You can always 'sync' manually by copying the Evernote folders to a usb drive.) Here are some highlights:

• Evernote has a firefox plugin to clip a section, url or entire page to your notebook. Clipping a page means even if the post or article goes away, you have a copy locally. More importantly, you can also search your entire notebook for words or phrases so it doesn't matter how you categorize it.
• But you can categorize it too, in a way that's actually more useful than a burlap bag full of stuff.  Evernote uses tags. You put as many tags on an entry as you want, so instead of choosing a particular folder like "vegetables" for the juju bean article, you can tag it "vegetables", "magic beans", "cool ideas", "funny words",  and use as many tags as you like. The same article could be flagged as something you want to use as a story idea, a recipe you want to try and a design for a birthday card, all at the same time.
• You can combine tags to search for stuff. You may find information you didn't even know you had, like some items in the intersections between nannies, story ideas, the Hadron Collider and things that glow in the dark. You can pull nets of information together, like todo, projects and fun.
• You can sync your notebooks with your smart phone, tablets and kindle. Which means you can make notes or take pictures on your phone downstream and these become part of your collected notes on all your devices. This is handy at the supermarket when you get the idea to make a recipe you captured online, or when you're choosing a bottle of wine mentioned by a facebook friend. You can to take a picture of something at the store, record a brief voice note of an idea to explore/research later.
• You can add voice annotations to notebook entries instead of typing commentary and add them to  pictures, bookmarks or whiteboard snapshots. In fact, a note could just be a voice recording, tagged with appropriate info.
• With the advent of the Skitch add-on, you can also annotate pictures and screenshots without the messy loop of saving an image, bringing it up in a graphics program, adding text, re-saving and then putting it into Evernote. You can roundtrip the whole process directly from the note. With shared notebooks, this becomes a handy collaboration feature, even if it's just to paint mustaches on the boss.
• Through the clever use of tags, Evernote can also serve as a GTD system, to keep tasks and projects organized, a brainstorming pool, insight generator, or method to slice activities and perspectives many different ways into new gestalts of understanding.

Pocket

This used to be called Read It Later. Once you've setup Evernote for the persistent stuff, Pocket can act as a helpful agent for stuff you aren't ready to file yet, but don't have time to read right now.

• Stuff flagged for read later can be viewed in a cool, pinterest type matrix during snippets of idle time.
• The entire contents of the pages flagged can be downloaded onto a tablet or smartphone to read on the go.
• After you finish reading an article it goes into an archive, so the link is always available.
• You can use tags. But if you are using Evernote, you probably shouldn't create a whole other network of tags here.

While useful, Pocket can be dangerous if treated as a sole replacement for bookmarking. You could end up in a situation where you've flagged so many things to read that it would be infeasible to download them to a device (and it doesn't yet have the capability to selectively download.) A more manageable approach is to use times when you would be surfing to catch up on these things you already determined were worth your time and toggle back and forth with this keeping your reading queue small and easy to download for times you need to take it on the road, or to the cafe.

With these two tools, Dudley can now capture everything with confidence that he can easily find whatever he saves. And now it's more than just a repository, it's a tool he can use creatively in ways unique to him. 

And using Pocket with discretion, he can now seamlessly time-box intervals to catch up on things that are too fascinating to miss, but which would slide through the cracks otherwise.

Goodbye bookmarks, and good riddance.