Now Where Was That Article Again? Google Bookmarks!
Craig Daniels does it again with his great blog posts about helpful tips we can use through Google. Here's one for bookmarking all his great posts!
Thank you so much Craig! I am so glad I found you on Activerain!
The amount of information that inundates us on a daily basis is overwhelming! How many times do you come across something online that you know has GREAT value but, at the moment, you don't have time to follow through on it. So what do you do then? What I do is click my all-important "save for later" big red button! You know the big red button Staples has, "that was easy!" Here's the thing about "save for later"... it may be EASY to click the bookmark option, but if you've been online for more than a week, your list of saved items gets so long, it now is not really all that EASY when it comes time to FINDING something later.
So along comes Google to our rescue. What I'm talking about in Google is a page I'm fairly certain you haven't seen which is why I'm showing it to you now. Its called Google Bookmarks (I'll abbreviate as GB). What makes it different is that besides just saving it to a bookmarks list (which activerain does that too) GB allows you to INDEX your list FOR EASY RECALL. Let me illustrate two recall searches for me that take UNDER 20 seconds each!
There is a wireless mic video demonstration that Mark "the Kodak guy" does on a blog post. So in my head the keywords are Kodak, Mark, Video, Mic. In GB, I can type a keyword or I can scroll through my index list and within seconds I've recalled the article.
Another example, let's pretend I forgot that it was Tara that demonstrated how to embed youtube into AR. All I can think of is one keyword "embed" but that's all I need. I scroll to the keyword and click it and voila, the article! Now I can share it with others when they get stuck!
Now how do you do it too?
(note to reader: if you don't have a free google user account yet, get one! this is js just one of many places where you can use it!) First thing to note is that on my bookmarks bar I have added two buttons what I label gb and gb+ the first one shows the Google Bookmarks reference page and gb+ means ADD the current page to my boookmarks list. When I click gb+, a pop-up appears and asks me for labels (note: we also can think of these as "tags"). This is the critical part! Create a list of keywords/phrases (separated by commas) that you know in your own head that you will relate to a search for this article in the future. In my head, I often relate to the author such as Mark or Tara in the examples above, so I will tag the author name in case that is the part that I remember in the future. Add at least a couple of other words that make sense in your own "mental index". What is nice about the tag system, and please don't miss this, is that it pops up suggestions based on previous tags that you have used. That way you will be sure to pick the same ones and your tag groupings will grow into nice category lookups. For example, I enjoy "blog ideas" types of posts and bookmark the good ones. You can click that link to see some of the articles that I have tagged into a lookup category.
My previous post was about using your bookmarks/favorites bar in your browser. To create the gb button, simply favorite to your bookmarks bar the GB listing page when you are on it (rename it after to the abbreviated ref). Next, to create the gb+ button, you will have to drag a special button from this creating bookmarks help page up to your bar. As I mentioned in previous article, if you name your buttons with short abbreviations, your bar will hold many more buttons.
What is also cool about google bookmarks is that it is part of the cloud-computing experience. You have access to these bookmarks whatever device you are on... work, home, laptop, netbook, tablet, even your smart phone!
Well that's it for today's class! Happy bookmarking! :)
google.com/bookmarks(note: while the screenshots I used are from Google Chrome browser, this is not exclusive to Google Chrome, you can use it in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or any other browser!)
About the Author - Craig loves technology and loves to teach others about it!
If you'd like to learn more about Craig, see recent post "Who Is Craig Daniels?"
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