Velenux: Bookmarking interface for modern web browsers

Sorry for my english :)

Bookmarking is about retrieving informations. You browse, then find an interesting article about… whatever and you want to save his location for a later revision.

The current paradigm for bookmarks is based on a common interface, the folder/entry structure that you use for browsing trough the files on normal filesystems.

That’s a good method, since you can organize your bookmarks into categories, sub-categories, and so on.

Categorization is good, but often you need more flexibility. Maybe you want one of your bookmarks to be accessible both from the “Graphics” and the “Webdesign” folder, then you should copy the bookmark in both of them, and we all know that you should not repeat yourself :)

As a solution to this issue, Mozilla Firefox 3 introduces bookmark tagging: you can assign multiple small text labels to each bookmark and use them to improve the categorization.

I see two big issues in Mozilla Firefox current bookmarking model: managing bookmarks and accessing bookmarks.

Managing bookmarks

Managing bookmarks includes both folder structure (that I think is very useful for giving a general structuration to your bookmarks) and tags. The current folder structure works pretty well, it’s a solid interface design that could be used as a fallback for every user.

About tagging I find that current interface could be improved a lot:

the input field (text field) should have some kind of auto-completion (something like Blogger autocompletion?)
the tag list should be a multi-column view instead of a single column
tagging multiple bookmarks at the same time
- tagging all bookmarks in one folder
  - auto-tagging folders (bookmark inherits folder tags)
notice when browsing non-tagged pages, or maybe a reminder about random not tagged page that needs some love (Dria’s “tag” logo with an exclamation point?)
access all non tagged bookmarks (via a smart folder entry?)
tag suggestions (that’s a wide topic)
- from folder tags
- from other bookmark in the same folder tags
- from delicious (see FF bugzilla)
- from page meta tags (see FF bugzilla)
- from text analisys (text match on existing tags Dria on tagging)

Accessing bookmarks

Knowledge management is pretty useless if you don’t have a good interface to retrieve stored information.

smart folder creation wizard (es. create new folder that search for a term in bookmark title, description, url or tags… or maybe even multiple terms with boolean operators)
add *“search in your bookmarks”* option to the search engine list

Bookmarking interface for modern web browsers

Managing bookmarks

Accessing bookmarks

Further reading