The bookmark. That humble, miraculous, time saving invention. Cast aside from the properly bound pages, a detached strip of paper is found indispensable. The consecutive pages provide opportunity for progress. What has passed and what is to come is marked by the movable. It has no words of its own. But it unlocks the words it skips over. 

The bookmark isn’t bound to the story, but it marks the progress. Which is why the bookmark as the primary metaphor for saving links on the internet makes no sense. A bookmark moves with you. It can only be in one place at once. If marking multiple pages for reference is the goal, sticky notes become the tool. 

But for websites, the language of “bookmark” is baked into the browser. They don’t aide progression through a story. They accumulate as promises of information we’ll never return to. Half the time they’re found “broken”. It’s a Roladex of websites that may or may not ever be flipped to again. 

When I create digital bookmarks, I tell myself story. I don’t write “this is an online tool for generating color palettes”. I write “my friend Michael texted me the link to an online tool for generating color palettes while we were eating breakfast in Cincinnati”. The story about how the information entered my life is more helpful for cataloguing than the reference it is preserving. 

It’s much simpler to place stories in time and space to find my way.