The history of bookmarks is one of those tragic stories in technology. When bookmarks were first introduced (by Netscape? or maybe it was Mosaic?) they were a huge step forward. Trying to memorize urls or writing them on paper clearly weren't methods that worked well. The idea -- and so simple too -- that the browser could remember the urls for you was the perfect solution.

Sadly, since the "big bang" of bookmarks there have been precious few new explosions.

The basic problem

The introduction of bookmarks, welcome as it was, created a problem that remains with us today. Once you start bookmarking pages, you inevitably produce a list of bookmarks that becomes more chaotic and less useful the longer it gets. Sure, a list of bookmarks is useful when you can look at it and quickly know what is there, and when you can see the bookmark you want to load right now.

But when you start having to scroll the list, and not only that but use the PageUp/PageDown keys to scroll the list quicker, it's a good sign that it's getting out of hand.

A collection of bookmarks is all well and good, but it needs some kind of structure superimposed on it to remain effective.

The bookmark toolbar

The bookmark toolbar encapsulates the insight that some bookmarks are more important than others and offers a number of improvements:

1. Allows marking some bookmarks as more important/more frequently used.
2. Gives them better visibility.
3. Provides quicker access to them (by not having to go into the bookmark menu).

The bookmarks are displayed on a toolbar, either as links or as links-within-folders.

Despite how useful this feature is, browsers have historically treated it as something of a marginal feature. Firefox, for instance, used to view the launcher toolbar as just another folder in the bookmarks collection (albeit with a special name, like "Personal Toolbar Folder"), which you could accidentally rename or delete, and then it wouldn't show up as a toolbar anymore.

Another thing that matters a lot to the usability of the toolbar is the drag-and-dropability of bookmarks onto the toolbar, into the folders, and from one place to another. Even today, for instance, in Google Chrome I can't reorder the items in a folder on the toolbar without opening the Bookmark Manager.

Import/export (and the silo)

It hardly needs stating that once you have a bookmark collection in one browser, you don't want to manually recreate it if you decide to use another one. Browsers have historically been reluctant about giving out their bookmarks. All too often, despite making a show of offering to import your bookmarks from another browser, the import mechanism has bordered on the useless.

First and foremost, every browser vendor since the Ice Age has been eager to supply you with a tasty selection of bookmarks that he was convinced you would love. Importing your own bookmarks, therefore, could at best be seen as a supplement. No browser would ever just take your existing bookmarks and overwrite its own vendor-supplied ones, which is exactly what the user wants. Instead, it would stash them somewhere in the bookmark collection, well out of sight. Any additional metadata that was implicitly stored in your bookmarks would often be lost, like the order in which they were listed.

In particular, the browser would make no bones about trying to find out if you have a bookmark toolbar in there, and replace it with its own (despite the browser having a toolbar feature that worked exactly the same).

So having done an "import", you would typically have to manually organize your bookmarks, nuke the stupid vendor bookmarks, and sometimes you'd even have to recreate the folder structure of your bookmark toolbar, all before you had been able to achieve the same state as in your other browser.

This kind of situation is standard silo behavior. By making the import feature so mediocre, the browser vendor would pretty much ensure that the user would not switch browsers without paying a high price for it. Simply using more than one browser on a daily basis, with an easy way to manage your bookmarks across them by a quick sync, is just not realistic.

Bookmark sync (and more silo)

A way of keeping your bookmarks synced across computers has been a no-brainer feature since the era when people started accessing the web both at home and at school/work. And yet, a working synchronization feature is a pretty recent development in bookmarks. I recall some failed attempts with Firefox extensions in the remote past, but at last it is here.

A number of browsers have a sync feature now, and it's a big step forward in bookmarks. Even if your bookmark collection is a mess, you can at least have the same mess all over the place. Clean it up and it's clean everywhere.

And yet, bookmark sync is yet more silo behavior: you can sync your bookmarks from Opera to Opera, but not from Opera to Firefox. The fact that bookmark sync doesn't do the same half-assed job of the import feature might seem strange, but the motive is very obvious:

• ability to have your bookmarks up to date in our browser on every computer = good for the vendor
• ability to have your bookmarks up to date in every browser = bad for the vendor

Browser vendors know very well that if bookmark sync worked as poorly as bookmark import, they couldn't sell it as a feature, because noone would use it.

Bad page titles

Strangely enough, I've come all this way without mentioning just about the most glaring problem that bookmarks have: bad page titles. Since the name of the bookmark is simply the title of the page in 99.99% of the cases, the title ought to be both descriptive and concise. Instead, we have historically seen that web creators much prefer titles that are variations on this theme:

The Excessively Long Title Of My Website Which Is Very Nice Indeed: Section Title: Article Title

With titles like that, all too often you can't even see the title of the article in your bookmark list, because the text is truncated somewhere in the middle.

Quite apart from the length problem, web sites often prefer to give articles catchy titles rather than descriptive ones. So with a title like:

Something Amusing That Makes You Think About What The Page Really Is About

you have the short term benefit of being amused at the cost of the long term benefit of a descriptive title.

Bad metadata

Bookmarks belong eminently to the category of things where the number of items is so large that it would be great to have a way of automating the retrieval/organization of the items.

Yet, despite announcements from Mozilla in the past that they would soon obliterate the old model of bookmarks-as-a-list, and introduce a new and all-conquering search based approach, we still have the list. The fact is that bookmarks don't contain enough metadata to make search useful. A bookmark has two pieces of data:

1. The name of the bookmark.
2. The url.

Sure, some browsers give you the option to store other things too, like tags, but if we all agree that the user can't be bothered to keep their bookmarks organized, let's not pretend he will actually input any of the optional stuff. And even if he does, 90% of his bookmarks won't have any other data associated with them, so we're back to the short list above.

So why doesn't search make sense? Because much too often neither the title nor the url contains any of the keywords that you would want to use in order to find this bookmark. Web sites don't pay too much attention to titles, and the real data that would be useful to search is the page itself, which is not available.

Bookmark oblivion

What should seem ironic is that bookmarking a page often has the effect of not bookmarking it at all. The bookmark is saved somewhere in the long list and then never seen again, either because the list is too long to really bother looking at beyond the most recently added items, or because the page title is useless, or because it was bookmarked "for future reference", and by the time we return to this topic we've forgotten about the bookmark.

We tend to grow pretty oblivious as to what's in our bookmarks. Over time, some pages expire, others drift out of our sphere of interest, yet the bookmark collection doesn't get updated.

Just about the most obvious feature a browser might offer is to try loading the bookmarks from time to time, in the background, and marking the ones that return 404.

Another idea might be to offer to list bookmarks according to how often they are loaded, making the never used ones fall to the bottom of the list. Applying this to the bookmark folder might be especially useful, so the user doesn't have to reorder the bookmarks to make the frequent ones quicker to reach.

chiarezza

impegnativo

vicino

Chris Rock did a really solid bit a few years ago:

"Colin Powell can never be president. You know why? Whenever Colin Powell is on the news, white people give him the same compliments: 'How do you feel about Colin Powell?', 'He speaks so well! He's so well spoken. I mean he really speaks so well!' Like that's a compliment. 'He speaks so well' is not a compliment, okay? 'He speaks so well' is some shit you say about retarded people that can talk."

Here's the bad news. You are probably Colin Powell.

Here's what you might have been thinking. In fact, almost certainly what you were thinking. You were thinking that here I'm going to study this language, learn to pronounce it right, learn to write grammatically, learn to use the correct expressions and after all that is done I'm going to be competent in the language. I'm going to go up to a group of these people and join in, like I'm one of them.

Unless you're some kind of extreme scholar whose only interest is ancient scrolls or something, you are learning the language to have the social benefits. To interact with those people, to have access to those new social groups. You might be thinking sure they will be able to tell that I'm not one of them; my pronunciation won't be exactly right; my use of the language won't be perfect. But it'll be close enough, and with enough practice I can get really smooth.

But that's where you might be in for a nasty surprise.

And no one told you about this. No one told you that it's not conquering the grammar that's really tough, it's not teaching your mouth to make those new sounds, it's something different.

It's that you're Colin Powell.

You will stand out in a crowd and people can tell. They will give you compliments on how good your language is. They do this because they know you need the encouragement. No one gets told that their language ability is good when it's actually good, that would be absurd. When it's obvious, there's no reason to say that.

It's common for people who have some kind of disability to say that they just want to be treated like everyone else. And therein lies the crux of the matter.

You're not "like everyone else" and everyone else knows that. So you get treated differently, good different or bad different, but always different.

Either people are trying to be helpful and treat you as if you understand less than you do. And over explain things to you. In which case you want to tell them "look, I understand more than that, give me some credit."

Or you get bad different. You approach someone with a carefully constructed message that you know for a fact is completely correct, yet you don't get the response that you expect. You get a short, dismissive response. You get treated almost as if you had said something slightly insulting.

It's that... what you said was understood and you basically made your point clearly, and yet... you don't sound authentic. There is something odd about you, reading between the lines, that makes people second guess themselves. As if you're speaking lines from memory that don't entirely fit the context. As if they're not sure if you know what you're saying. As if they don't quite know how to respond to you, how to interact with you. In short, you are an aberration, an exception to the rule.

And when people are unsure how to respond, they tend to seem a little cold and a little dismissive.

Is there any good news? Colin Powell really never did become president, but you're better off.

You can get beyond this. It's hard to say how long it will take, but if you stick with it there will come a time when your grasp on the language is smooth enough that you do sound like the real thing. Sure, you might still have an accent. And you might still be making mistakes. But your performance will be smooth enough to convince. Convince that you know what you're saying, and that he who is responding to you will be understood, that you can communicate as equals. What is the quickest way from here to there?

I wish I knew that.

Quando vai in piscina qui in Olanda, c'è lo spogliatoio, ma non c'è quello maschile e quell'altro femminile, c'è uno solo per tutti. Dentro ci sono cabine per ognuno da cambiarsi i vestiti da solo. Poi vai a prendere la doccia con tutti insieme, uomini e donne.

Questo sistema mi ha sorpreso, perché in Norvegia ci sono i due compartimenti per uomini e donne separatamente. Tutta l'area in qui c'è lo spogliatoio e le docce (e la sauna, che non manca mai) è dunque ristretta. Quando andai in piscina una volta a Roma era lo stesso.

Sembra che gli olandesi preferiscono una maggiore riservatezza rispetto ad alcuni dati personali. Paradossalmente, c'è la sorveglianza per telecamera proprio dentro lo spogliatoio, in modo che da un certo angolo si vede dentro alcune delle cabine.

Is it true that man is curious of nature or does he merely crave a scapegoat? Is the diversion of his curiosity onto an authority figure a corrupting influence or is it the willful satisfaction of an urge stated in incorrect terms?

If I say to you "look, a pen on the table, it came into existence". And you express great curiosity about the pen. "But how, where did it come from, how did it come to exist, why did it begin to exist?". Then I say "Bill made the pen." And then you walk away satisfied. "Okay, Bill made the pen." What does your behavior suggest? You really don't care about the pen at all.

You might be thinking "Bill made the pen, if I ever want to know how he did it, I can always ask him later. The question is not urgent."

A person with genuine interest in the pen would say "the identity of the maker is immaterial, I still know nothing about the pen. I want to know how he made the pen, what did he make it out of, where did he get the raw materials, why did he make it?". That is an attitude coherent with the stated thirst for knowledge about the pen.

Does a believer who says they urge to know how the world began really understand and correctly describe their own urge? Is the answer that "someone did it, but you will never know how or why" an answer that such a person should reasonably find satisfying?

If the believer was troubled originally by such dilemmas as "how can something come from nothing?" and "why is there anything?", is he now cleansed from such thoughts? Has the wondering ceased?

What precisely has been gained in the knowledge that Bill is the maker of the pen, if nothing about the making of the pen has become known?

Maybe the urge was never about the pen's origin in the first place. Maybe the urge for answers about the pen was only a misstatement about the the urge to find a scapegoat, an authority. Someone who can take the blame if it turns out that the pen is causing us a lot of problems.

The predicament is, in both cases, of a similar nature. The urge for an answer stems from our human psychology, but for he who wants a scapegoat, science or philosophy, which are not in the business of inventing authorities, will never fill the void. Mythology is thus the last hope.