I’m a pretty online kinda guy. I wouldn’t go so far as to give myself a geek label because that doesn’t do anything to improve my image with women, but if I lived on a planet with no women I would probably be called a geek. The funny thing about being a geek is that you tend to keep a lot of bookmarks in browsers scattered across various computers between work, home and the odd strangers house you managed to get some laptop time in. To the untrained eye – or less net savvy individual – this collection of links is just a quick way to find favourite websites (hence the term Favourites). (Right now there may be one or two of you tempted to nod your heads and say, yeah but that’s what they are. If you are, slap yourself, because this is wrong). No, bookmarks are windows into a geeks cultural identity; they will tell you what they like and don’t like, and what phases and fads they went through in days, months, years gone past. You can pretty much take all those Favourites links and work out what kind of person they are better than any psychologist armed with a completed Rorschach test.
This became very apparent to me during the week when I migrated all my own bookmarks from the seven computers I use with regularity, and the ones I had in an online bookmark service, all into another online bookmark service (called delicious.com for those interested). I had something like 550 links in total which amazed me to start with, and then amazed me more just seeing what kind of things I had actually bothered to favourite since 2002. I went through periods of being into linux, goth chix, 80’s t-shirts, 80’s music, Annie Lennox, digital cameras, cheap airfares to India, xbmc, crappy blogs *cough cough*, bittorrent, more goth chix, mmorpgs galore, cheap chinese blank cds, russian brides, paranoid cryptoware, and a whole lot more. I did wonder what some psychologist would have made of it all, especially if I had’ve done a Rorschach test with him and said all the pictures looked like vaginas.
I spent about 4 to 5 hours tidying all of the bookmarks up, removing all the ones that had become roads to nowhere, and were from phases I just wasn’t ever going to go through again, like applying for jobs with secret service agencies in every country in the free world (no kidding, I had tons of application forms bookmarked in their own category). In doing so, I got down to 173 quality bookmarks that I think represents the new modern me, and which anyone else would think represents someone in the new electro-bohemian class of society. It’s almost a fitting way to make an online introduction really; swapping bookmark collections to see how compatible you are, and whether or not you should make a date, or block that person to hell. Personally I know if I meet a girl with 100 Favourites in the “Cats” category, I’m heading for the door, and I’m not looking back!
So in the new modern online era our choice of bookmarks define us as much as our choice of furniture, music, movies and porn. All of which would be bookmarks in their own right. Which in the end, really makes my point for me.
Andy.

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