This post is generated to spark an entry on your spring cleaning to do list. We all clean out the garage, attic or closets but what about all the stuff that's collecting dust on your hard drive. Those of us who are avid surfers of the web end up with tens of megabytes in pdfs, emails, photos and trial software. However, the area I want to cover today is bookmarks. We all do it... find some great article, product or whatever and we hit the old keyboard shortcut to save that link. It goes somewhere, but what happens to it in a week, 6 weeks or longer? If you're like me you may visit a couple of times when it's fresh on your mind and then later when you look through your bookmarks you can't remember why you saved it in the first place. I call this species, linkus packraticus. To solve part of the problem you can add descriptons and put them in folders etc. but the real problem is that we are amassing information for which we have only one giant container. How to organize all of that is a topic for another post or perhaps many posts but the real issue is time. How many sites can you realistically keep up with and digest, five or ten?
We're swimming in a sea of information and often cannot connect the dots because the purpose for the information has yet to be defined. The context must be provided by you and I, which goes beyond the fact that someone simply wanted us to see it. Many things are trivial enough that they won't affect our daily lives but some things, big issues take time. There are at least two approaches 1) simply take everything they say at face value and truthful or 2) do your own thinking and research, which takes time. Those who wish to influence our thinking are hoping we will choose option 1.
As the volume of thought and opinon increases and is pushed up to the web, we the lowly digital citizen must learn to navigate the flood so as to not drown in the process. If strategies useful to all are revealed, we will be happy to post them here.
