I have about 400 bookmarks between Opera and Firefox on my workstation and laptop computers. Every once in a while I sort through them to remove dead entries and figure out if I still need to keep some of them. Despite my efforts, I usually end up deleting very few bookmarks. I've been trying to analyze why this is; for some reason I have an emotional attachment to links, some of them on pages that I have not fully read, some of them on pages that have information I can't use. Some of them are even on sites I don't particularly like.

So I thought really hard about why I have so many bookmarks, and it boils down to the fact that I am using bookmarked links to solve two problems: Finding unique and useful information in a Google search, and finding things that I didn't know I wanted. These things are difficult to do. For instance, I found out last year that I occasionally suffer from sleep apnea. The standard medical cure for this is to wear a Darth Vader mask hooked up to a water vapor air pump when you go to sleep, which you do for the rest of your life. An unfortunate side effect is that you wake up saying things like, "There will be no one to stop us this time!" and "You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander, I'm here to get you back on schedule."

In all seriousness, from my frame of reference, this solution does not address the problem. The problem is that I'm not breathing correctly when I sleep, but the sleep doctors tend to assume that the problem is that I was born without a breathing machine to hook up to at night. If I buy a machine, I'm cured for as long as I use it. Imagine how miserable vacations would be without it. Naturally, my reaction was to hit Google to determine if there are alternative treatments, and to see if I could read some stories from people who have dealt with this problem before.

I spent several hours reading through the same information over and over again on different sites, all of which were at the top of the Google results. Little of the information was conclusive, which is another way of saying it was useless. The best information came from two sites, which I've bookmarked: this article on a preliminary medical study, and several message threads on the Apnea Support forum. Both of these led me to develop my own cure for sleep apnea, and so far it is working rather well.

There are many such bookmarks in my collection -- sites that I'm worried I'll never find again, and may need to consult later. The IBM Lotus Symphony page, which is not navigable from www.ibm.com as far as I can tell, is a perfect example. So is this Google video capture of The Century of the Self. Since I'm doomed to forget the title of that documentary, I'll never find it again unless I bookmark it.

The other aspect of bookmarking is finding things I don't think I'll be able to find again -- in many cases, things I did not know I wanted to find. There's this site that makes custom teddy bears, and a collection of Leisure Suit Larry music remixes, to name two. Until I found them, I didn't know I wanted to bookmark them.

So the list is 400 and growing, with no end in sight. Perhaps if there were less clutter on the Web, I wouldn't need to pack so many links into a single menu in my Web browser.

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