iGoogle Bookmarks Gadget

If you're like me you sometimes feel as if it's just about impossible to keep up with the seemingly infinite (Buzz Lightyear: "...and beyond!") variety of online tools and services. Of course, every one of them would have you believe that their service is the one you absolutely cannot live without.

In the last few months especially I started noticing numerous references to sites like del.icio.us (see Wikipedia) and digg (see Wikipedia again) all over the web. I had no idea what they were, but it turns out that these and other sites/services like them are places to store and/or share your favorite bookmarks (additional features and methods of implementation may vary from service to service).

I've particularly noticed these things of late under each post at Ken Levine's blog. He even recently posted a very short (non-)explanation about such stuff in response to commenters' questions about why the method of accessing them on his blog had changed. Mr. Levine calls the services "aggregator sites." I have no idea if that's a semi-official term or not, but it seems logical enough.

Tonight I discovered that Google has a bookmark service. I have no idea how it compares with other similar or analogous services for features or ease of use and frankly I can't be bothered to take the time to try any of the others. I simply wanted a way to store some links to a few favorite sites and the Google bookmark service seems to provide that adequately enough. Since I'm a currently registered Googler, their bookmark service is already available for my use. (I prefer to keep my specialized service registrations—even free ones—to a minimum if I can help it because, let's face it, who can remember all those account IDs and passwords once they accumulate beyond a certain point?)

Now I'm not necessarily all that hepped up about sharing my bookmarks with everyone. What few I do think others may find of general interest I list here in my sidebar links, so in a way this blog is already my online bookmark site and my method of sharing them with others. In researching the Google Bookmark service I read that all stored links are private, that only I can view them and use them (by logging in to my existing Google account). I don't really plan on placing anything there where security is all that critical anyway, but nonetheless I still prefer that any stored bookmarks be for my eyes only since the intent is merely personal convenience.

In addition to the general links in my blog sidebar there are some sites/pages I frequent which have a much more specialized focus and therefore are probably not of much potential interest to anyone but me. There have been occasions when I've used other computers and wished I had my own bookmarks with me. Well, of course, that's the beauty of online bookmark services. It beats having to randomly Google for each specific page you want to visit when you can't possibly remember the lengthy URL. You don't have to carry some physical media with the actual saved bookmarks or install them on someone else's PC that you may occasionally use.

What really convinced me to use the Google bookmark service is the fact that there is an iGoogle gadget version which lets me access the bookmarks right on my existing iGoogle page which I use all the time anyway—convenient!

Ironically now for having said how I prefer my links remain private, here's a screen shot of my iGoogle gadget showing a few miscellaneous link names I set up. The comment which is part of the image is a result of hovering the mouse pointer (even though it isn't shown) over the first Bloom County link...