No method to the madness.
I'd like to be able to write that each tool that I use has its own particular
and specific purpose. It would be nice to write this, but the truth is that I'm
often quite unsure why I've used a particular tool instead of another. I seem
to be continually confusing myself. I find myself asking why today I chose one
tool for remembering a site, when yesterday I used another. I can only rarely
convince myself that there was a specific reason for using a specific tool.
What do I use? Furl - because I often
want to be sure that the entire text of a page has been saved, and because the
topic title and keywords that I give it make it easy to find again; Net
Snippets - because sometimes I only want to save a short piece of text,
but still want to remember where I found it; good old bookmarks - because,
hey, they're there, and adding them to my already enormous file is so easy and
even second nature (and when you can add comments, they can really become useful
notes); and of course e-mail to myself, particularly gmail
because searching it is so easy (and has recently started working in Hebrew as
well) that it essentially works as a notebook of thoughts to myself. I have to
admit that Google Desktop Search
makes searching plain old outlook mail (and any other notes I might make to myself)
pretty easy too, but why fill up a hard drive when we've got a full giga of external
memory. As I've already noted here, I've been playing around with Wikalong,
but nice as it seems to be, at present it's still more like a toy.
And of course as is to be expected, I'll often think I saved something with one
particular tool, yet not succeed in finding it there because, as I later discover,
I'd used another. The more tools I'll have available to me, the more that this
will happen, but it's a price I'm willing to pay.
Go to: And I do, I do, or
Go to: In the margins of cyberspace.