Bookmarking

On the recent discussion about browsers on Palimpsest, talk turned eventually to bookmarks, as one member had recently had a problem with Firefox deleting them all. Not sure how that happened, but it is a useful reminder that in Firefox you can back up your bookmarks by saving them to a HTML file. This is doubly useful, for not only can you load them back in in the event of a disaster, but you can also lob them online and be able to access them if you use a different computer.

That, of course, is if you use bookmarks at all. Which I don’t. I think I might have done when I first started using the web in 1997, when they were part of the fun of using Netscape for the first time. But now? Never. It came as a real surprise to me that anyone still uses them, but apparently they do.

So what do I do? I rely on the keyboard – either by using my own browser’s history to autocomplete URLs for me, or by using Google. It’s just quicker, as far as I am concerned. I don’t even bother with the links on the left hand side of this site. When I set up my Google portal, I put in a few links, but never click on them. I do click on the links for the sites with RSS feeds, though, so maybe that says something.

I have tried some of the various bookmarking sites, like del.icio.us and My Furl page is linked to from this site, but everytime I start to use it, I just get bored. Sites I want to share with people I link to from here. Filling in countless fields for every site I find interesting just isn’t something I want to do! And is there an option on Furl to display a simple list of all the sites I have bookmarked? That might be interesting. But the main view is just too damn complicated for my liking. If there was an option to click a toolbar button and the site was recorded, with no other interaction required, then that might be useful too, it would become second nature to Furl sites and maybe have a look through once a week to see if there are any gems there. But it’s all just too time consuming at the moment.

Update: Having said all this, though, I am going to experiment for the next couple of days of using both Furl and del.icio.us to log the things I look at. Links are over in the sidebar, under ‘Me’. Let’s see which is best and whether I can actually be bothered with either.

Time for the web pioneers to pick sides

From today’s Guardian: Time for the web pioneers to pick sides.

Yahoo has been sending men up mountains. Last week, the portal – which claims to be the world’s biggest, with a user base of more than 345 million – unveiled its latest journalistic enterprise, Richard Bangs Adventures. The five-part multimedia package is produced by the eponymous adventurer, who is following mountaineer John Harlin on an expedition up the same peak that killed his father 40 years ago.
It’s a marvellously well-formed piece of multi- media journalism, and gives the kind of all-encompassing coverage that only the combination of video, audio and text provides. It’s the kind of experience that can only be delivered through a complex channel such as the web.

It goes without saying that this appropriation of other media by and for the internet is not new. Yahoo is only alone in pushing forward in multiple areas. The portal recently announced that it was hiring former CNN and NBC correspondent Kevin Sites to work for it. Sites – who came to prominence writing a weblog of his journeys in Iraq – is travelling to every war zone in the world in a year. His exploits will be tracked through the website Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (hotzone.yahoo.com).

The idea that Yahoo is interesting in making news, not just repackaging it, should come as no surprise. After all, it is now a vast media empire. But while it’s all very well sending reporters on “dangerous” missions into the unknown, elsewhere the commitment to independent journalism doesn’t seem so secure.

Google Print, Firefox, Google Portal

A day off work today. A few quick things before I get on. Maybe more later…

  • Google Print is online. Had a quick play, looking for H.G. Wells’ The First Men on the Moon. Sadly that text is still under copyright so not all of it is available. Plenty of other classics are there in full though. Haven’t had a chance to see what options are available for printing – I am guessing that it is probably just an on screen thing.
  • Firefox has reached a 10% share of the browser market, according to ZDNet, linked to by John Naughton. This is good news, not least because the more people using FireFox means that they can’t be ignored, and web sites will have to start complying with standards to ensure their sites are displayed proplerly.
  • Google’s personalised portal is now released for the UK. Has a few new links for UK related stuff, like news and even the London Review of Books! Sadly, the UK-centric weather service focuses only on a select band of cities – the closest to me being Wolverhampton, which is almost completely useless!

NaNoWriMoSest

Everyone has heard of NaNoWriMo, the web-organised novel writing sprint, which involves writing 50,000 words to get a novel finished during the month of November. It sounds like madness, and it is.

What’s the point of it? Well, part of the idea is that the quality of what you write isn’t all that important. It’s the very act of getting the words down on paper, or rather onto the screen, in such numbers that the whole thing just won’t seem so daunting any more. Plus, there might be some nuggets of plot or character, or maybe even a chunk of some genuinely good writing that can be salvaged. It also gives you an opportunity to say to people at christmas parties that you are now on your second novel.

Over on Palimpsest, we have set ourselves a different challenge. We are going to try and get the 50,000 words done collectively. With more of us involved, the individual word count goes right down, but complications are added, such as getting the thing to make sense, for example. Have a read of the various deliberations that have taken place over who is involved, how it can be done, and what the plot should be.

The actual document is being collated using the web word processor Writely – which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the UK and the US are working on the same document. A copy of the work in progress is published for other Palimpeople to read and keep up-to-date.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out. It looks like there will be a massive editing job at the end.