It's not only "saving".
Did I write something about a particular subject already? Or perhaps I only bookmarked
a couple of articles about that subject and now want to give them some serious
consideration and perhaps write that "something' that's still waiting to
be written. Maybe I've both collected a number of articles, and jotted down some
notes - via a number of different tools of course - and now want to collect all
of these. Maybe I've just read an article that helps me make sense out of a number
of other items I've read recently, but I realize that because those other items
weren't yet part of a coherent context, I didn't bookmark them, and now I want
to find them again and tag them in a manner that will be useful for me.
The thinking processes that we go through as we sift through different materials
and allow them to make sense to us are hardly ever linear. Instead, they're a
disconnected conglomerate of activities that achieve some semblance of meaning,
and order, when we ultimately find a way (or ways) of organizing them. Until then
... well, if we knew what we were going to do with something the moment we first
encountered it, most of this sifting, and note taking, and organizing (not to mention searching for it later) wouldn't
be necessary.
Keeping something as "new" in my RSS reader isn't really the same as
"saving" it. It only means that I've got a better chance of getting
back to it if and when I realize that I want to. I doubt that we could say that
Google search history actually "saves" anything - it simply reduces
greatly the reservoir of sources in which I can locate something that I now realize
I want. And of course a bookmark "saves" nothing more than a path, though
when I can run a full-text search on the destinations
that those specific paths lead to, that "nothing more than" turns out
to be a great deal.
Go to: One tool to rule them all?