The article, Keeping Found Things Found on the Web analyzed "a fuctional comparison of different methods of keeping Web information for re-use". As a whole, the result of the study is significant, but I cannot understand that the portability of Bookmarks is low. Because we can copy and paste "Bookmarks" easily to our own diskettes, folders and etc., and carry to our home from our offices and vice versa.
Now I'm using Windows XP as an OS. In my case, my "favorites(Bookmarks)" are located in one of the subfolders under drive C.
Anytime, anywhere I can use my "favorites", because they are very "portable".
I use Mozilla, and the bookmarks are in one file, so are very easy to reuse. An additional advantage is that it's very easy to print out or email the entire set to someone else, and even better I can quickly make an HTML version to annotate and post for remote access (I've had that happen at work, where a co-worker wanted to duplicate my bookmarks. We were using IE at the time, however, so I couldn't give her a list; I had to copy the file structure to a shared drive instead and go over them with her verbally. I have a LOT of bookmarks!).
However, I've done all the things that the article talked about: emailing URLs to myself or to others, printing out pages (particularly when I'm working on a paper), pasting it into a Word document or into my bibliography manager, etc.
One particular grip I have is about sharing a set of bookmarks between browsers. Mozilla imports IE Favorites, but not the other way around (as far as I know). This limits the portability of the bookmarks, although you can point IE at a Mozilla/Netscape bookmarks file and access them that way. Even worse, I have a mini-browser called Blazer on my PDA. I haven't figured out how to transfer bookmarks to it. My Palm Eudora doesn't have "live" links, so I have to copy and paste URLs into Blazer. The Palm OS is also pretty bad about file structures, so I can't transfer bookmarks that way, either (ie., there's no separate area for documents, and you can't really drag and drop documents into it). I saw a rumor the other day about a possible Palm/Apple collaboration that would modify the Palm OS so that it would show up in Mac OS X as a separate disk that things could be dragged to or taken from, but I'm not sure how that would work on the Palm side.
Posted by: dcplumer on February 26, 2003 11:39 AMThank you, Judith, for pointing out that Windows XP stores bookmarks in one of the subfolders under drive C. That's something I didn't know.
Posted by: Lisa Baehr on February 28, 2003 09:05 PM