Bookmarks and Social Tagging, and Zotero

What bookmarks are you using?

I do a heck of a lot of research, and I’m also highly inquisitive, and the Favorites button just doesn’t do a good job after the first couple thousand bookmarks.

And what if you use more than one computer? Good lord.

The on-line bookmark choices are never ending. It’s like trying to find a decent mutual fund in most cases; I’d almost rather put a stick in my eye. Social bookmarking? What’s that? I want a private place to keep and comment on my stuff. It’s not a social game to help me find friends. Maybe I’m missing something. I’m not sure I understand Digg at all, especially since there seems to be an active sub-group whose politics are just left of Lenin.

And don’t ask me to download all kinds of widgets and menus and otherwise clutter my computer with more overhead. Windows is mind numbingly memory intensive and unstable as it is. And if Explorer is quite fast, it doesn’t really play well with others. Firefox has the benefit of being more open, with an impressive cadre of entrepreneurs adding useful add-ons, but it has a notorious way of clogging up and slowing down over time. I’m sure if the authors knew how to fix that, they would. The point is that I carefully guard my browser because they both have mysterious weaknesses which threaten my hardware investment and lessen my vast exuberance for reading about golf swings at 2:00am in the morning. My defensive tactic is to ensure any additional programs are non-intrusive and don’t bring a lot of baggage with them, like adding services to my kernel (sometimes I can’t avoid it), and otherwise giving me the feeling that I’m now driving down the Internet super highway in a huge 40 foot tractor trailer rather than the sports car I want to be driving. Incidentally, speed, or more accurately the lack of it, kills usage of any website, even Google.

Social Bookmarks and Back-up

I like Diigo, but wow can it ever get slow. I really like del.icio.us, and the extensive array of choices I have there, especially since it lets me choose whether my entries are private or public, and allows both tagging and comments. There again, the issue is how slow it can be. It often seems like I am waiting more than I am working. Lately I’ve been using Diigo just because of their useful bookmarklet, and telling Diigo to forward them to del.ico.us as well. time to time, I like how both search public data. Xmarks will synch or replace your Firefox bookmarks on a remote server, and so I use that for back-up.

There’s nothing worse than losing your hard drive or having to re-install Windows because of virus problems, and losing all your bookmarks. Hey, it’s going to happen some day. And I realize given human nature that no one is going to start backing up their bookmarks, or at least emailing the file to an on-line email address just because I warn you of the consequences of losing them altogether, but believe me, you never want to go through that more than once. If you use Explorer, you can always download Firefox and import Explorer bookmarks just to get them on a remote server. Xmarks’ biggest issue is that it slows my computer down when I’m surfing the web, so usually I just deactivate the plug-in. About once a week I reactivate it and replace all my bookmarks there.

Zotero and Connotea

I experimented with Connotea. Wow, it’s a great site. Now there’s some folks that are thinking.

But it really was discovering Zotero that moved me away from Explorer and made me a full time Firefox user. That’s how useful it is. As you browse the web it allows you to store articles and interesting subject matter. Then it generates bibliographies or footnotes in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word in any format you choose and automatically synchronizes your database with their remote server. That capability makes your library of citations available for every paper or book you write anywhere there is a computer on-line! It will even store a picture of the website for posterity, in case the referring site goes down.

It’s final awesome capability takes the cake. Members of on-line journal databases (like JSTOR) or university libraries with remote access to on-line articles and books can place the resolver in Zotero and it will search the databases for you and then place the citation in your database! Now that’s what I call living in clover.