A New Web Toy Actually Worth Using
It is a truism unworth stating that right now the Web 2.0 is quite possibly most suited to wasting your time. It overflows wth AJAX widgets, aggregators and memetrackers, all of which work perfectly to fill the idle minutes to utter fullness with a nonstop cavalcade of links and Korean youtube videos. Don’t get me wrong; I love it. I eagerly seek out every new wine or book tracker and create demo accounts with every social bookmarking site that comes across the transom. My life is a nonstop, 24-hour singing and dancing Web 2.0 Wonderland. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge the limitations of this lifestyle. The recent extreme explosion of connectedness and sociality has (as has been lamented many times heretofore, by personages more august than my own personage) led to a general narrowing of attention spans, a reduction to the bite-sized when it comes to content. There are advantages to this system, and disadvantages, neither of which I will insult the reader by delving into.
I mean all of this merely as an introduction to a new web app which I think, outside of being shiny and new and AJAXy, establishes itself as useful and worthwhile precisely because it seeks to provide some antidote to that above-described trend: dogear. Its first vote of confidence is that its name is neither some odious nonsense word, nor does it end with a consonant-r. I would say that its value goes deeper, though.
Basically, dogear is an online bookmarking site—but I mean bookmarking in a sense much closer to its real-world analog. You plug the URL of a page or document into the dogear site, and proceed to read it, just as it was before. The functionality is: if you then click on any header or title on the page, the clicked text gets highlighted in yellow, and it saves your place. You can then return to the document and continue where you left off; that’s all.
It’s simple enough to sound entirely unremarkable, and that’s why it works. The action of the site (even in this somewhat inchoate form) is so elementary and transparent that it is absolutely no pain at all to integrate it into your daily web perusals. Any time you find yourself reading a long document and need to pop off somewhere else, just click the bookmarklet and come back later. It’s not a general bookmarking site, or a catch-all process-later bin like del.icio.us; it’s, very narrowly, a what-I’m-reading-right-now box.
The effect of that box, however, is the exact opposite of the torrents of links and snippets I described above: it serves to extend your memory—dozens of times I’ve been reading something online, momentarily lost interest, and Xed it, only to a minute or an hour later wonder what I had been reading, or where this interesting notion came from. Some blog, or linked item, within the last week, probably, but who can keep track of which bullshit identical web2.0 marketing futurist web comic book music web site you read last?
I won’t belabor the point further, for it’s a very simple one; I don’t have any profound insights on our ‘MTV culture’, nor will I ever have the patience for any byzantine productivity contraption of folders and rubber bands and excel spreadsheets. But it’s nearly invigorating to see things on the web take a turn from the connected, interwingled and immediate to the slightly more deliberate and considered. I’d like to see much more.
Accounts on dogear are still on a request-by-request basis; sign up and wait for them to get back to you. Mine only took a couple days to show up, though (at which point I had completely forgotten that I’d signed up in the first place, of course), so hopefully you’ll have the same luck.
Comments
- Wade Rockett on June 12, 2006, at 12:28 PM
- Sean O'Hagan on June 18, 2006, at 03:41 AM
- Z. D. Smith on June 18, 2006, at 10:01 PM
