In the beginning, you could bookmark things to your web browser, and lo, it was okay. Because even in the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, there were enough websites out there that you couldn't be expected to remember them all.
And then there were search engines, so when your hierarchical bookmark folder system exploded out of sheer unwieldiness, you could just depend on a search engine to find what you were looking for, most of the time.
And then there was the vastly underappreciated Delicious, which let you bookmark things to the cloud, tagged for easy reference and rediscovery, and mostly shared in an awesome and unobtrusive way that meant you could often crowdsource information on a given subject in a way that you can't do with search engines, thanks to all of the metadata appended to Delicious bookmarks.
(And then Yahoo listed Delicious for sunset,AVOX AVOS bought it and eviscerated it, and everyone in my network fled to Pinboard or gave up on social bookmarking. It's still criminal what Yahoo had, and then trashed, in early December 2010. The Library of Congress archives tweets; this crowdsourced database directory of metadata-tagged encyclopedic knowledge deserved the same preservation. Yes, I am still saddened and furious, a year and a half on.)
And all the while, the popularity of various social media streams like Twitter and Facebook kept growing - more places to discover all sorts of useful information. But more often than not, these useful nuggets of information were buried in private or semi-private notes that were difficult if not impossible to bookmark (particularly with Facebook), let alone be able to search for after-the-fact. Neither of these tools come with particularly incisive or inclusive search functions.
Enter Greplin. (Referral link: right now, I have the free account, which lets you unlock a limited number of sources; if you join through me, I get to unlock more sources for free. :) )
Awhile back, in mid-February or so, I had the ambient awareness that we were in the heart of Maine shrimp season up here in New England; given that I follow a couple of hundred local restaurants on Twitter and Facebook, I would have been hard-pressed not to note that every Cambervillain chef and then some were dishing up wild Maine shrimp specials. So when I was at the grocery store and saw that they had wild Maine shrimp on special, you bet I picked up a pound of 'em and headed home to do my research.
Which meant that I typed "Maine shrimp" into Greplin and received the following results, personalized to my various reading lists:
Most notably:
- East by Northeast had a Maine shrimp congee.
- The Blue Room fried up their Maine shrimp with jalapeno butter.
All this was crossing my mind at the same time I'd opened Google Reader (looks like the promise of HiveMined is dead, so GReader is the best alternative for now, even with no sharing) and spotted Jaden Hair's recipe for skirt steak with kimchi butter. Which inspired me to make wild Maine shrimp juk with kimchi butter:
And it was damned good, even though the kimchi butter scared![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hyounpark at first. (He does not tend to trust me with kimchi anything ever since I brought him home a Lil' Kimchi, aka a grilled cheese, kimchi, and sweet sesame black bean sandwich. PROOF IT EXISTED.)
Moral of the story: GREPLIN IS MY NEW BACKUP BRAIN AND IT CAN BE YOURS, TOO.
*
( Tangent. )
And then there were search engines, so when your hierarchical bookmark folder system exploded out of sheer unwieldiness, you could just depend on a search engine to find what you were looking for, most of the time.
And then there was the vastly underappreciated Delicious, which let you bookmark things to the cloud, tagged for easy reference and rediscovery, and mostly shared in an awesome and unobtrusive way that meant you could often crowdsource information on a given subject in a way that you can't do with search engines, thanks to all of the metadata appended to Delicious bookmarks.
(And then Yahoo listed Delicious for sunset,
And all the while, the popularity of various social media streams like Twitter and Facebook kept growing - more places to discover all sorts of useful information. But more often than not, these useful nuggets of information were buried in private or semi-private notes that were difficult if not impossible to bookmark (particularly with Facebook), let alone be able to search for after-the-fact. Neither of these tools come with particularly incisive or inclusive search functions.
Enter Greplin. (Referral link: right now, I have the free account, which lets you unlock a limited number of sources; if you join through me, I get to unlock more sources for free. :) )
Awhile back, in mid-February or so, I had the ambient awareness that we were in the heart of Maine shrimp season up here in New England; given that I follow a couple of hundred local restaurants on Twitter and Facebook, I would have been hard-pressed not to note that every Cambervillain chef and then some were dishing up wild Maine shrimp specials. So when I was at the grocery store and saw that they had wild Maine shrimp on special, you bet I picked up a pound of 'em and headed home to do my research.
Which meant that I typed "Maine shrimp" into Greplin and received the following results, personalized to my various reading lists:
Most notably:
- East by Northeast had a Maine shrimp congee.
- The Blue Room fried up their Maine shrimp with jalapeno butter.
All this was crossing my mind at the same time I'd opened Google Reader (looks like the promise of HiveMined is dead, so GReader is the best alternative for now, even with no sharing) and spotted Jaden Hair's recipe for skirt steak with kimchi butter. Which inspired me to make wild Maine shrimp juk with kimchi butter:
And it was damned good, even though the kimchi butter scared
hyounpark at first. (He does not tend to trust me with kimchi anything ever since I brought him home a Lil' Kimchi, aka a grilled cheese, kimchi, and sweet sesame black bean sandwich. PROOF IT EXISTED.)Moral of the story: GREPLIN IS MY NEW BACKUP BRAIN AND IT CAN BE YOURS, TOO.
*
( Tangent. )
