What Are my Going to Do with 403 links?
I’m a big social bookmarker, perhaps too big. As I was looking at my account yesterday, I realize I have 403 links bookmarked at BlinkList. And that is nothing compared to some folks. But what in the world am I going to do with 403 links? How can I reasonably use or manage this information?
Interestingly enough, I care little about the “social” part of social bookmarking. I am compelled to use BlinkList because: 1) It is easier to manage a larger number of links with it. 2) I can access my bookmarks from anywhere.
BlinkList is most useful to me as a means to track my comments. It is a part of the puzzle to excerpting my comments in the sidebar of my blog. It also powers the business links section on the home page of my site.
My thought on social bookmarking, like the use of categories on my blog, was to keep the number of tags I use to a bare minimum. That was done by using more high-level approach with tags like “web 2.0″ and “podcast”.
I’m not sure that works though. What I find more useful are very specific tags for very specific information. For example, during the research I did for my post on NSA wiretaps and MySpace, I bookmarked all links under nsaandmyspace. Now, I know exactly what sorts of links I can expect to find there. Same thing goes for my networkneutrality links.
Then there is this problem - article not found. That’s probably a pretty common problem for news type links. How many of my 403 links no longer work? There is really no way to tell.
Marshall Kirkpatrick brings up a whole other issue - the pain of having multiple social bookmarking accounts. He wants to be able to separate work from personal links rather easily. I sort of do that via private links in BlinkList but it is annoying to have to always check that box. And my personal tags still show up in my account (even though I’ve told them they shouldn’t), although viewers can’t actually access them.
The reality is that I don’t need 403 links. There are probably hundreds of links in BlinkList that I really am never going to use again. I’m going to rethink my whole approach to social bookmarking. And it may be as drastic as exporting my links, cleaning them up, and starting all over again.
March 30, 2006 at 9:11 am
One possibility is to use a service that informs you about broken links. Simpy does. Or Spurl does (and saves a copy), and Spurl even sends your links to del.icio.us, if you want to have this feature. The crucial question is: how important are these news pages to you? Do you really need a copy, or do you prefer sorting them out when the permalink does not work any more?
March 30, 2006 at 1:04 pm
On sites no longer available: Some social bookmarking systems save a cached copy of each page you save (like Furl.net and Spurl) you can use them in conjunction with Blinklist all through one button via Onlywire.com This is invaluable to me.
March 31, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Take a look at my ListMixer service — it is a lightweight front-end into Blinklist (& del.icio.us, etc.).
No signup/login is required — your unique ID is built into the bookmarklet. (This also makes it easy to manage multiple ListMixer accounts, since you never ‘login.’)
Add links using the bookmarklet. The page description gets prefilled with any browser text you’ve selected.
If a link in your collection goes unclicked for over 30 days, it gets automatically deleted. Of course you can delete/edit links manually.
Promote worthy links from ListMixer into your permanent Blinklist by means of a handy link.
It’s my baby: http://listmixer.com
Cheers- Sid
April 1, 2006 at 11:49 pm
My take on “how do I manage 403 links?” is that you shouldn’t even be asking that question. You shouldn’t really have to _manage_ _any_ of your links. Why _do_ you have these links? I assume because they are interesting, and you want to save them, so you can refer to them later when you need them. If that’s the case, how do you refer to them later when you need them? You have to remember that you may have them in your account, and then search for them (forget browsing, it stops working as soon as you have 50+ bookmarks). If you want the best search functionaity, use Simpy (its blog is a part of the Corante Web hub, too). You don’t want to have to manage yet another thing in life, there are only 24 hours in a day. So, save, tag, and then find.
As for how to tag things - the first way, using general tags is really a creation of categories using tags. It works while you have a small number of links, but as soon as you have a few pages of links tagged with the same tag, you’ll see that you really want to use tags more as keywords, so that when you search using multiple tags/keywords that your mind associates with the link you want to get, you get fewer links that match your search.
Off to bed to manage my dreams…