I have a problem with bookmarks. The kind of problem that most people would call a habit, but which I've come to see as something closer to a vocation. I save everything. Articles, design references, product launches, restaurant recommendations, architectural photographs, obscure blog posts about topics I'll probably never return to. My browser's bookmark bar is a stratified archaeological site of my interests over the past decade, and if you could read it properly, it would tell you more about who I'm than any CV or biography ever could.
What you save is different from what you share. What you share is performance - it's what you want people to see, the curated version of your interests that reinforces the identity you're building in public. What you save is private. It's the article you bookmarked at 2am because something about it resonated but you couldn't articulate why. It's the design you screenshot because it solved a problem you didn't know you had. It's the recipe you saved not because you'll ever cook it, but because the photograph made you feel something.
Your bookmarks are your autobiography. And most of us treat them like a junk drawer.
The Delicious era
There was a time when bookmarking was a social activity. Delicious - the bookmarking service that launched in 2003 - understood that your saved links were interesting not just to you, but to people who shared your interests. You could tag your bookmarks, and those tags became a folksonomy - a bottom-up taxonomy created by millions of individual curation decisions. You could browse other people's bookmarks and discover things you would never have found on your own. The bookmark wasn't just a save. It was a signal.
Delicious was acquired, neglected, and eventually shut down, because the technology industry has a remarkable talent for destroying the things that work best. But the insight behind it - that accumulated bookmarks are a form of self-expression and that sharing them creates value - was ahead of its time. We're still catching up.
I built Trove partly because I miss Delicious. Not the interface or the technology, but the idea. The conviction that what you save matters. That the accumulation of your digital magpie instinct - grabbing every shiny link that catches your eye - isn't clutter but data. Data about who you are, what you care about, and where your taste is heading.
The private self
Social media encourages us to perform. We share the articles that make us look smart, the causes that make us look virtuous, the jokes that make us look witty. There's nothing wrong with this - self-presentation is a fundamental human behaviour. But the performance is always a subset of the reality. The interesting stuff is in the gap between what we share and what we save.
Look at your bookmarks right now. Not the organised ones - the messy ones. The ones you saved in a hurry and never categorised. The ones sitting in your browser's "Other Bookmarks" folder, unsorted and forgotten. What patterns do you see? What topics appear again and again? What categories would emerge if you forced yourself to organise them?
When I did this exercise, I found themes I hadn't consciously recognised. Japanese design kept appearing - not as a deliberate interest I was cultivating, but as an unconscious pattern in what caught my eye. Product launches for tools I would never use but whose design philosophy fascinated me. Long-form articles about the history of specific typefaces. Architectural photography of mid-century buildings. None of these were things I would have listed as "interests" if you had asked me. But my bookmarks knew before I did.
Bookmarks as taste development
Taste isn't a static thing. It develops through exposure and accumulation. Every link you save is a data point in the ongoing development of your taste - a small vote for a particular aesthetic, perspective, or way of seeing the world. Over time, those votes add up. They reveal trajectories. They show you where your sensibility is heading before your conscious mind catches up.
This is why I think bookmarking tools should be smarter. Not in the AI sense of "here are recommendations based on your saves" - though that could be useful. Smart in the sense of helping you see patterns in your own behaviour. Showing you that you've saved twelve articles about a specific topic over the past month. Highlighting the intersection between your saves - the unexpected connections between things you thought were unrelated.
Trove is my attempt at building this. A tool that treats every saved link as a signal - not just a thing to read later, but a data point about your taste. The magic isn't in any individual bookmark. It's in the aggregate. It's in what emerges when you look at a thousand saves and see the patterns that connect them. That pattern is your taste, made visible.
Against the junk drawer
Most people treat bookmarks like a junk drawer. Save it, forget it, never look at it again. The bookmark folders get deeper and more chaotic. The unsorted pile grows. Eventually the whole system becomes so overwhelming that you abandon it and start again, losing years of accumulated signals in the process.
This is a tragedy, not because the individual links were important, but because the collection was. Your bookmark history is a unique dataset that no one else in the world has. It represents decades of your attention, your curiosity, your taste. Losing it's like losing a diary. The individual entries might seem trivial, but the whole tells a story that can't be reconstructed.
I want to make the case for treating your bookmarks with the same respect you would give a personal archive. Not obsessively organised - that defeats the purpose, because half the value is in the serendipity of uncategorised saves. But treated as something worth preserving, reviewing, and occasionally mining for insights about yourself.
Because your bookmarks know things about you that you don't know about yourself. They know what you find beautiful before you can articulate it. They know what problems fascinate you before you recognise the pattern. They know where your taste is heading before you've arrived there. They're the most honest autobiography you'll ever write, created not through deliberate self-reflection but through the accumulated unconscious choices of a thousand idle moments.
Save everything. Review occasionally. Trust the pattern. Your bookmarks are trying to tell you something. The least you can do is listen.
