Re: About Bookmarks and Categories

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

Hi Kristoffer,

On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 01:09 +0200, Kristoffer Lundén wrote:
> The condescending words about average users aside, I would like to
> request an explanation on how this is more intiutive and furthermore,
> what benefits it gives. The simplistic behaviour of picking *one*
> folder and sticking your data in it seems to be the most intiutive to
> me. There isn't much to be confused about then.

I think the primary advantage is that if I need to look up some material
I can think of any of the topics under which it is stored and access it
from there.

> I can get pretty annoyed in for instance gmail when the only way to
> say that a mail is from my school, and about the education in general,
> and another mail is also from my school but about a certain class - is
> to mark up with several labels, or create separate labels for all
> these cases. Actually, I have to create completely separate labels,
> because the quick-links only allow to select one label at the time.

I can agree with that. A topic-based system can have scalability issues.

> Maybe it would work if the menus allowed to *easily* search on
> multiple criteria at once. In a way, that's what a hierarchy does.

If you're talking about the Location entry bar, then it might be
worthwhile, though only really applicable for very large scale
collections of bookmarks. If you're talking about the bookmarks menu
itself then check out this patch which is getting closer to being
included:
  http://home.exetel.com.au/harvey/epiphany/

> Frankly, I've been trying to come up with examples where I would like
> to reach a bookmark in several ways, and not coming up with a single
> one. Plenty of examples on when I'd just put it in one top level box
> though, and a few where it'd make sense to have sublevels to that one.
> Say "development/web", "development/epiphany" etc. Those don't make
> enough sense with the topics "development" and "web" all by
> themselves, it's the combination that does it.

Here's a real-life example from my bookmarks:
  The CP'05 conference goes under Research, Constraints, Publications.
  The IJCAI'05 conference goes under Research, Publications.
  The Cork Constraint Centre goes under Research, Constraints.
  My research lab goes under Research, Constraints, University.
  My supervisor goes under Research, People, Constraints and University.
  My website goes under the same as my supervisor, plus Projects.
  My friend's website goes under People.

You can see that sometimes I'll want to access my supervisor's site via
'People' or by 'Research'. Sometimes I'll want to access the CP'05
conference via 'Constraints' or via 'Publications'. The choice depends
on what I'm doing *at the time*, not where I placed my bookmarks.

      * I've just thought of an idea for multi-agent cooperation. Where
        could I get that published?
      * I've just thought of an idea for a constraint satisfaction
        algorithm. Where should I check for similar ideas?
      * I've just been modifying my website. Where can I access that
        link quickly? (hint: Projects, because that's what I'm *doing*)

Regards,
Peter. :)