[tptacek]

I use Pinboard to read cryptography papers and follow IETF security mailing lists; it allows me to skim large amounts of material, spot anything that might look useful, bookmark it quickly, and move on.

I have a browser search engine shortcut so that if I type "pin <something>" into the URL bar, Pinboard will search all my bookmarks and tags and comments and (apparently) full text of the things it's archived, including the full text of PDFs.

So, if right now I wanted to find exactly the paper where Rogaway described the powering-up mechanism in the XEX cipher, I can just type "pin rogaway powering" and very quickly have the article in front of me.

I'm not sure how I would manage to do that with browser bookmarks.

I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".

[edj]

I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".

Exactly. Pinboard is my personal record of everything online I find useful or interesting enough to remember.