Electric April: Organizing your bookmarks

Think about all the changes that have occurred in Web design, usage and power over the last 15 years. You know what hasn't changed? The bookmark organization system for most browsers. It's still all about pull-down menus, subfolders and toolbars.

Not exactly inspiring, is it? And it can get unwieldy; sometimes it's hard to know how to classify a bookmark to put it in a folder, and it's often easier to just hit "Bookmark" and let the link fall where it may. And it might lay where it falls for a while; most people have a lot of bookmarks they haven't visited for months or even years.

But before you settle down for an afternoon of sorting your bookmarks into little folders on a toolbar, why not see what else is out there? Some third parties have come up with options a little more enjoyable than the bleak browser offerings.

One option for organizing your bookmarks that has the profound advantage of portability is a social bookmarking site. You know those options at the end of blog posts that mention saving that post to Digg or Delicious? Those are social bookmarking sites. Here's an example of a page at Delicious:

What "social bookmarking" means is that not only can you view your own bookmarks, you can view what other people have bookmarked, if they've chosen to share it. And you can see how many other people have bookmarked that same page, to get a feel for overall trends on the net.

You don't have to share your bookmarks on these sites; you can keep them private and be able to view them from any computer you log into the site from. However, you have to opt out of sharing rather than opt into it; sharing is the default state.

Another possibility for bookmarks is to organize them visually onto pages or tabs, using a personalized Web portal. Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo all offer personalized web portals; CEO Express is an example of a personalized portal targeted at executives.

NetVibes is another personalized portal provider; like iGoogle, it offers "widgets" that put modified content directly from the site onto your NetVibes page. Sites such as Hotmail, Facebook and eBay offer these widgets, as do many travel search engines and shopping engines.

If your linked site doesn't offer a widget, most personalized portals provide link modules that store the URL, the link title and notes and a screen capture of the site. This is especially useful for visual thinkers.

For bookmarks, as for all other aspects of organizing, I really want to emphasize that what's important is that the system you use works and that you like it. Getting Sorted isn't about forcing you into a system, it's about finding and implementing a system that fits you.

What kind of bookmark system do you use? Personalized portal, social bookmarking or browser-supplied folders? Let me know in the comments!