⬅️ Designed Sealed Delivered 🧭 A.I. For You ➡️

Clean My Bookmarks

September 17, 2023 by Jay Cuthrell newsletter bookmarks backstage idp servicecatalog platform engineering zettelkasten obsidian

This week we take a look at the rise, fall, and rebirth of bookmarking services.

This week’s musical inspiration in title and lyrics:

https://open.spotify.com/track/6g48vpikqU2atsrDXdGzKo?si=bb10d2a480d04495

Getting Informed

Bookmarks (or Favorites or Stars) are still a popular way to remember websites without reliance upon search engines that periodically gave rise to social-bookmarking sites. In fact, stars icons even made it to more niche social sites such as GitHub where you can sort by the number of bookmarks (favorites) in the form of stars.

I bookmark many things… but usually in a browser vs. a social-bookmarking site. Lately, I’ve become more clippings oriented as I drive more workflow into Obsidian.

Now it’s time for reading 📖, listening 🎧, and watching 📺 suggestions:

First, 📖 How Spotify Achieved a Voluntary 99% Internal Platform Adoption Rate in which Jennifer Riggins interviews Helen Greul on convincing developers in deep water rapids of software delivery that being inside the Backstage boat is in their best interest and how to fashion or grab inner-source paddles.
Second, 🎧 Hybrid Cloud Revolution in which Tim McConnaughy, Christopher Miles, and Alex Perkins interview Karl Cooke then bring a network engineer perspective to both cloud networking as well as managed k8s with a plug for Azure Arc.
Third, 📺 Breaking Analysis: Cloud security and Gen AI in which David Vellante unpacks data from ETR and conveys a story for how natural language interface tooling may provide much needed human machine augmentation partnerships that also address the thousands of unfilled security practitioner roles across industries.

I’ve seen them fall, fast and steady 🎶

It’s been almost five (5!) years since the social-bookmarking site, Del.icio.us, was shut down after being acquired by another social-bookmarking site, Pinboard.

https://www.techmeme.com/170601/p10#a170601p10

https://www.techmeme.com/181020/p14#a181020p14

But I keep falling when I’m higher 🎶

Two (2!) years have gone by since I first fell down the rabbit hole with Matter.

https://www.techmeme.com/210922/p44#a210922p44

As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to use Safari Bookmark or Reading List with every intention of going back and… it happens sometimes. Yet, even flirting with reader aggregation oriented apps, I still find myself abandoning the technique for more portable alternatives.

Over the next few issues of this newsletter there will be a formatting change.

After 100 songs it reached, I will drop the inclusion of Spotify play list updates
Work Plug section will be removed entirely next week (unless there is something I want to share) which should give me back 45 words for the 500-1000 words that readers tolerate 🤣
Workflow will be increasingly driven around Obsidian and automation
Embedded rich cards for URLs will likely shift from mikrolink (thank you!) to an alternative
I’ll try to wrap up all of these and any other changes in time for a Zettelkasten end of year for 2023

https://fudge.org/archive/zettelkasten-end-of-year-for-2022/

So, what will be the next big thing in bookmarking services?

Until then… Place your bets!