Internet 102: Collecting and Organizing Your Links

Collecting and Organizing Your Links / Favorites / URLs from research or simply stuff you want to keep.

First off, these new notes are Internet 102. When I include a query for you to try, I will put it in this form, " query " . Just copy the query from within the quotes and don't copy the quotes. If the quote IS a quote, I will put that inside the quotes too.

For the most part I will not list that many links, just the query itself. You can do the search, change it to suit your needs, add an s on the end of the query like Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz http://www.researchbuzz.com/ suggests or roll your own. You will find plenty of information.

If you read my other notes here, Internet 101 you will already have read most of the information on how to access http://www.google.com/ more efficiently and have read the tutorial on Google here: http://www.googleguide.com/ . For instance, another sort of query is to change " query " to " ~query " and you will get the query and synonyms.

OK, now just how in the world DO you organize the links / URLS / Internet sites etc. you have collected? Over the last 9+ years online I have collected more than 5000. YIKES. Since http://www.google.com/ has become so powerful, most of the time I simply use it. I learned a lot about using http://www.google.com/ and I don't have to collect many now. However, there are reasons to keep your own collection/s.

For instance, you might read dozens of blogs, news sources or any other topical sites that change daily. Well, you could get rss feeds or you can go directly to that site. One way to do the latter is collect the sites, put them in order and view them at your leisure.

Another reason to collect your own links is for research itself. Say you are writing a newspaper article, a term report, thesis or dissertation. You would normally outline it while you are collecting your sources and writing at the same time. If you organize your links, they too could be in order. You can include them in many pieces as documentation. The links can be hidden, just for you or written out.

Sure you can use your browser's Favorites, Hotlinks, Bookmarks or the like but most of these are very hard to put in order and they are messy too, plus, saving them in this form can be tricky.

One way to save them is in an online " blog ", your blog. Another way is one of the many online " online bookmark manager " sites. These can be very powerful and are accessible from any Internet connection, unless you are traveling or live in a very repressive country. The downside of these is the NEED for that Internet connection to access them at all. You can make some of the pages appear on your computer by copying the pages or simply writing them in your word processor or text editor and saving them. It has the advantage of you being able to include links directly into your research paper or outline. The downside here is they can simply become unmanageable by their number alone.

The query " bookmark manager " gets to my favorite way to collect links. If you scroll down to http://www.kaylon.com/power.html in this search you will find the one I use. It has almost limitless storage and works like this. You get to a site, click the green flag and the URL is stored with any meta data already there. I will explain this in a moment. You then add any words you wish so you remember your own thoughts when you got to the site. Later you type the query into the search box and violins, its there. Sometimes the query brings along friends from other sites, other links and you can visit those. Just click on the link and a browser window opens the link. Cool.

There are lots of tricks to searching and I will pass them along as I remember or find them. One is, when you find a site you really like and want to return to, you bookmark it. If this was found as a result of your search query, then you might ask yourself, "What drew me to this site?" An excellent way to discover that is to check the " meta tag " by right clicking in a clear space on the page and choosing View Source. This gives you some other words to include in your search.

Here is an example. Visit http://www.kaylon.com/power.html , right click, choose View Source and you get this line: < name="keywords" content="bookmarks, bookmark manager, opera, netscape, internet explorer, personal search engine, favorites, hotlist, status check, navigator, communicator"> ( I moved the < > open and close marks for web pages over one space since the line would not show up. The real line would not do this. ) You see just what the folks at Kaylon wanted the Internet spiders to find: bookmarks, bookmark manager, opera, netscape, Internet explorer, personal search engine, favorites, hotlist, status check, navigator, communicator. You can then do queries on any of these terms and get even more results.

Interesting, http://www.google.com/ does not give any results for this query, " < > " but http://www.answers.com/ does. Hmm. Well there you go. Don't rely on just one source for information. Keep digging. I found that the meta search engines http://www.webcrawler.com/ and http://www.dogpile.com/ do not find this query nor do other search engines like http://www.altavista.com/ , http://www.excite.com/ , http://www.live.com/ or http://search.looksmart.com/ .

Visual symbols, images and the like ARE hard to find it seems. This is curious and I will explore it more. I know the popos have this technology. So should we.

Searchers, start your search engines !!!