designswarm thoughts

Last summer I reviewed Open Design Now and Leonard Reviews have just published it. If you’re into the same things I’m into, you should read it :)

As the mass exodus to Pinboard takes place in the wake of the almost announcement of “sun-setting” del.icio.us, I had a real long thought about these bookmarking sites and exported by bookmarks from delicious in order to look at all of it. I found stuff I hadn’t looked at in ages. Some of it made me smile. Like opening a box of photographs.
Thoughts:

- I used to use online bookmarking a LOT more in 2006.

- Bookmarks, for me, are about forgetting, but knowing where to forget.

- For me, there’s nothing social about bookmarking, it’s mostly deeply personal, but I’m glad other people used the same platform. When people would blog their del.icio.us bookmarks, I knew what that meant. I’ve never followed anyone else’s bookmarks, but I clicked on what people linked to.

- I cannot find it in me to sign up to new things like it’s 2007. I’m done being social online.

So I decided to hold on to the 1073 days of using del.icio.us and make a thing. I called it mybookmarks.

It’s a sort of archive, as we near 2011 and as a way to tell when I was most active, and what I was interested in. It’s like my Twitter profile, but just with my bookmarks and my comments, sorted by year. It’s for me, hosted by me, not going anywhere, not being sunset, just sitting there quietly being useful. It makes me happy. So there.

Bookmarks are dead, long live bookmarks.

(It also probably doesn’t work on anything other than my version of Safari, sorry.)

A recommendation from David , I’m very grateful to have found this book. Such precise and preciously rich writing. Intellectual truffles.

Page 4: “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?”

Page 36: “His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in a correct and acceptable fashion”

Page 44: “Of course, he wrote something like, How do you manage to live with such fog? By the time a gentleman has recognised a lady as she comes at him out of the fog, it is already too late to raise his hat. I’m surprised the race doesn’t die out when such conditions make difficult such courtesies”

Page 71: “One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, it to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.”