Today, I got a call from my brother, who wanted to talk about a website we had talked about previously- about a year back, in fact. I had forgotten all about it, what it was about, how it looked and what we had talked then.
But he remembered everything- plus a cloud of vagueness that buried the certainty of knowledge with its imprecise outlines, he was unsure what the website was. I promised him that I would look it up once I got home.
But within ten minutes, he called me back and told me that he had indeed found it. Its layout had changed, but it was the same nevertheless.
My habit is, when I see a page even remotely interesting, I bookmark it with Google Bookmarks or Delicious, or both. My thinking is, "If you can google it, you don't have to remember it." Much of the time, this works.
Well, the interesting thing is, my brother does not do this. But still he managed to find a page he saw about a year back. From what I know of memory, I think he has more chances of making better, dare I say more creative, use of these bookmarks than otherwise.
What do you say.
SO how did he find the page?
ReplyDeleteMemory alone?
Maybe at other times, you would do better than him. Like remembering some gossip. [smiles]
We are blessed by unique memory.
Actually, I am perturbed by the use of knowledge and memory: how we store them and how we make use of them.
ReplyDeleteI think Indians (the traditional of us) keep most of it in the mind and make flexible use of it- making different versions of truth; and the western educated among us, try to pin truth to facts. I don't know.
But it is interesting to see sites like Delicious where people have ten thousand and more bookmarks- what use can they make of it? Is it just the more-me, more-for-me stuff?
Personally, it is both for me.
Bookmarks are fine as long as you remember in what name or tag you stored it if not the purpose it would serve. More importantly you should remember that you have bookmarked it when you look for it. :)
ReplyDeleteWhen I was looking for that site, I remembered it was Baskar who recommended it and the site has got something to do with the word 'idea'. So I searched gmail for 'Baskar and idea'. Some 60+ mails showed up. Filtered some 10+ mails and looked into each one. The site name is ideacouture.com.
Sorry, I can't resist plugging Google. If you bookmark it in Google Bookmarks, you don't have to remember anything because it searches inside the bookmarked page. That is a great feature.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you have installed the Chrome Beta version that was released today, if you type the words in the so-called omnibox on top of the browser, it suggests possible searches, plus pages in your history and pages bookmarked in Google Bookmarks.
Just try it. If you have the Google Bookmarks bookmarklet in your browser, the interesting part of your history is just a click away. :)