There’s the following general problem: You find interesting links, documents, and other stuff online, and want to find them again (you probably won’t remember how you found them in the first place, or find them again easily if you searched for them again). Of course you could use browser bookmarks. If you use different browsers on different devices, or set up a new system with a fresh browser, then that approach is a bit impractical, because you’d have to synchronize or export and import all the bookmarks.
You could also store interesting stuff somewhere on your local storage, but then it’s only available at that local device. So, a cloud based solution looks like the best option. For a while I used Licorize for that purpose, which worked relatively well, but the last developer update for that web app happened 2012. My link archive on that app is still accessible, but I’m not sure that this will be the case for much longer, so I’ve basically given up on curating new links into Licorize.
Social media are a popular way of “storing” links into the cloud by sharing them. Effectively, I’m using Twitter to share and store really interesting links. Unfortunately, that method is not very appropriate for every kind of link. And using Facebook for archiving web activity is a really bad idea for many reasons, not least that it’s a real pain in the ass to find some old post on Facebook again.
Ok, so what about cloud based apps like Evernote or Google Docs? I mean, they work, but they don’t seem to be optimized for storing, categorizing, or tagging links, so they don’t seem ideal for that purpise. I just did some research on “social bookmarking” apps and found out that most of them seem to be either outdated, or mildly dysfunctional (Diigo). The only convincing alternative I found seems to be Scrible, which started out as web annotating tool, which then later on added bookmarking capabilities similar to those of Licorize. What’s cool about Scrible is that you can highlight sections of any web page and add comments at any location. So, I’ll give Scrible a try.
How do you do research on the web? How do you store your links? How do you archive documents you download or store in the cloud?