Keeping track…

Still working on coming up with a ‘comfortable’ format for my blog. I guess I won’t know until I know what I want to use it for, and I won’t know what to use it for until I’ve tried various things!

Anyway, one thing I definitely want to use it for is to ‘keep track of stuff”. Some stuff, anyway.

I’m using del.icio.us and gmail now to track a lot of stuff, especially Internet Stuff.

Stuff that warrants more than just a tag in one of these I will mention here, time and botheredness permitting!

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• del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/

What a godsend. All I can say is – use it.

In case you don’t know, this is a free web-based service which allows you to store your bookmarks. ‘So what?’ you may be asking yourself right now. This is not a first. We’ve all probably also had just about enough of bookmark hell anyway. I rarely bother marking anything these days. I consider google to hold all my ‘bookmarks’ and only have figure out the right search terms to find them!

The ‘history’ function of my browser is also well-worn. But neither the ‘history’ nor the ‘google bookmark’ nor the _actual_ bookmarking mechanisms available in-browser actually serve my purposes very well at all – nor anybody elses as far as I can ascertain.

This is of course a classic example of poor engineering. Why people (I include myself) still put up with things like this which _just don’t work properly_ is something I will leave alone for now What do I mean when I say they ‘don’t work?’

Ok, they work a _little_ bit. They are clearly better than nothing. But they are extraordinarily clunky, inefficient, and frustrating.

For some reason software producers have generally tried to deal with this by trying to design ‘better’ bookmarkers, and ‘better’ histories – with very little effect. Basically this seems to come down to making them look a little nicer.

However the real problem is that they are conceptually wrong – what they do does not match what they are ‘for’. What they are ‘for’ is storing and tracking information in a way that is most useful.

to be continued… maybe…

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