Month: November 2005

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.

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.