[tptacek]

Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks.

But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut.

What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked.

I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.

[idlewords]

Thanks for the testimonial!

I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.

[ralphc]

18,000+ bookmarks for me, although I started with del.icio.us back in 2006 and imported them when it went away. So yeah, I'm a fan.