Sort all of my bookmarks, the original plan for the evening; I needed to cleanup my bookmark folders and decide which were still relevant, and which needed to be removed. Even more so, I needed to cleanup my “Check Out” folder, otherwise known as the catch-all when I was too lazy to put the bookmark in its proper place.

As I began my process, and after getting through one of the first top-level folders, an idea crossed my mind. I hadn’t used most, if any, of these bookmarks in months. Why should I keep all of these? Most of them contained outdated or irrelevant information anyway, and for anything of real value I would find myself Googling for the answer before searching my own bookmark collection. After some debate I made the big step: I declared Bookmark Bankruptcy.

Similar to the concepts of Email Bankruptcy, I essentially deleted most of my current bookmarks. The only ones I kept around were bookmarklets, and one special folder called “daily” that contains all of my accounts that I check on a regular basis (Gmail, Google Wave, banking, Facebook, etc). As I stated before, anytime I need to reference a piece of information, my first instinct is to run a web search. In fact, I think that is a better method anyway: when you run a web search, you can look for the most up-to-date and relevant information on the topic, opposed to using the bookmark that you found two years ago.

After discussing this with fellow web-geek Jim Cloudman, he brought up the point “what about sites you care to remember?” To me, any site worth remembering should have an RSS feed or a Twitter account. If there isn’t an easy way for me to follow you, what incentive do you give me to check every day? If the content really is that good, I’m pretty sure I’ll remember the site (if not, then it wasn’t that good, was it?).

I think my decision to declare bankruptcy will be a good one. It has cleared up my bookmark bar in Safari, and now I don’t ever have to worry about managing them again. Once again, thanks for Google!