No, bookmarking isn’t dead. But to be fair, this post at The Next Web doesn’t actually claim it is. But it does open the discussion to how bookmarking has changed over the last decade or so.

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We all have our own personal usage habits and it’s dangerous to imply large-scale trends based on those personal habits or those of the people around us. But for the sake of adding a different point of view, here’s mine:

I never really used bookmarks for individual stories. That’s largely because I was always really bad about cleaning out my bookmarks, so when I did so I would then go in months later and have to delete dozens of stories. So I would use bookmarks for the sites that I liked to visit daily for current news on a variety of topics.

Then when I was introduced to RSS I shifted all of that there. All those bookmarks were immediately replaced by RSS feeds so I never had to go hunting through site sections for new content again. It was all right there and it was glorious.

I still use bookmarks pretty liberally, but for productivity purposes, not to save things to read later. So I have my various WordPress installations bookmarked and the URLs for the various CMS solutions I use for clients. If it’s a “read it later” type thing I put it in Pocket, where I will eventually deal with it. I used to use Delicious for various things, but…well…yeah, we all know how that turned out. 

So yes, based on this case study of one, bookmarking has certainly changed. It’s by no means “dead” since I’m still actively using it. But the reasons for doing so have evolved. And I’m not even a power user of bookmarks, meaning I don’t synch them between devices or anything like that. 

How about you?

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