As my wife Lisa would tell you I’m pretty dire at remembering stuff. If I need to remember many things then I’ll have to jot them down on a list. Then again my writing skills are pretty shonky as I can hardly do joined up writing anymore - a side effect of using computers all the time!
Putting things in context
The best way to memorise stuff is to create a context for it. You’ve probably seen documentaries about people who memorise a massive list of words. One technique is to visualise each word in a situation. We can remember situations much easier than we can single words. This “contextual memory” is being explored as a way of remembering things in your working day at a project called Info Cockpits over at Carnegie Mellon.
Bookmarks with context
So all this got me thinking about the humble bookmark. Over a period of time you amass a tonne of bookmarks. The context that exists to remind you what that bookmark was is the title of the page. But is that enough? Remember you found that holiday home in Florida with the 30ft pool? You bookmarked it - along with ten other sites that all said “Florida Holiday Home” in the title! So I’ve developed a little system that allows me to have a web based global bookmark area that has context. How? Quite simply when I want to bookmark a page I select with my mouse some memory jogging text on the page then I simply click a special javascript bookmarklet I’ve made in the browser bar. The page then gets added to a database complete with title, url and most importantly the text I selected on the page. Now that text serves as a reminder to what that bookmark was, plus I have one global place for my bookmarks, viewable from work, home, the beach or wherever.
Existing bookmarks already have the fields for ‘keywords’ and ‘description’, perhaps these are the fields you use in your bookmarklet?
Adding this sort of functionality as an ‘extended bookmark’ would certainly add to a power user’s experience, have you any intentions of making the bookmarklet publicly available?
Adam / 03/11/2003