Bookmark Everything!

I’ll be celebrating 16 years on the internet this summer, and as anyone can imagine that means I’ve seen a lot of crap. Even with the big storage of useless information that I call my brain, that means I have a lot of bookmarks, and with Firefox 3, I notice my habits of bookmark-keeping have changed substantially: I bookmark everything now.

Before FF3, keeping more than a few hundred bookmarks was self-defeating. Finding anything in the mass was hard, adding something to the right folder so it could be found again was getting progressively more difficult, and a Google search was almost always more efficient for finding things. FF3 changed this in three major ways:

  • By default, one click on the star icon saves the link to my unsaved bookmarks, and even if that means it doesn’t show up in any folders, it gets searched when I type a keyword in the URL bar (aka awesome bar).
  • I can now tag bookmarks, which saves me having to have any folders at all. All I do is click the star again, and tag the page with the first 2-3 associations that come to mind. This is great, and I keep adding new tags, but again, the awesome bar searches them when I need something later – and even if I don’t remember anything about an article I read, or even its title, I may remember that it had to do with cookie monster and that maybe I tagged that.
  • Foxmarks. This isn’t new to FF3, but I find that investing in a big bookmark collection is only worth your time if you don’t lose it every two years.

What about you? How big is your bookmark collection, what do you bookmark, and how many of you have managed to save any bookmarks from the 90s?