One of the boons of Web 2.0 technologies, like tagging, folksonomies, and social bookmarking, is that it gives a mental pack rat like me an immense feeling of relief and empowerment. I used to try and clip articles form newspapers and journals I thought were important. Back in the days before the internets, I mean. WIth browsers and bookmarks, I found myself saving bookmarks willy-nilly. And e-mails. The problems was that using a file architecture to manage all these handles (a small handle to grab to access more in-depth knowledge) became itself a time suck and a mental burden.
Searchability is key for me. That is one thing i learned from Gmail. It wsa liberating to simply abandon the compulsion to keep and organize old emails. By letting go and adopting a problem-solving mentality, I realized I could rely on my own mind to offer key words to search for relevant emails as I needed to find them.
Now delicious (and digg to a lesser extent) enable the same shift from organizing for organization’s sake to tagging and dropping (tag it and drop it till you need it). I can organize myself and my time instead of organizing my files, bookmarks, handles, etc.
This summer I want to keep streamlining. I still need and use paper copies of important articles. Just as I look through my delicious bookmarks or blog for ideas, I want to go to a file folder and review the articles there.
orgtheory.net
