Storing and Sharing Digital Materials - the problems that Pinboard.in solves and creates

I started in graduate school in the mid-1990s and was in a program that focused on the use of new technologies in education. As a result, we accessed and played with a lot of new tools at the time - including the World Wide Web. I’ve probably been through 50 different machines and 100 different browsers since then. Thankfully, pretty early on in the process of accessing information through the web, I realized that storing bookmarks in a browser was impermanent and inflexible. I was drawn early on to the web service delicious (de.licio.us) and turned many grad students and colleagues onto it back in the day.

Some years ago, I moved from delicious to “pinboard” which offers the same service (permanent bookmarks, organized by tags, not folders) and has the on point tag line “Social Media for Introverts”. And ported my delicious bookmarks over to pinboard. I can’t easily tell when the earliest bookmark I have tagged is - but I’m guessing around 2004.

Pinboard allows me to store away articles that might or might not have a place in my future. So when I see a good article on things to do in Paris, but I have no immediate plans to go to Paris, I tag it “Paris” and when I finally plan to go - or a friend tells me she is going - I can send her my list (I currently have 25 pages tagged Paris in my Pinboard). And when I see something I think might be a good gift for somebody, I tag it “gift” which is great in December when I’m shopping for Christmas gifts. Gifts is my second most popular tag - I’ve used it to bookmark 496 gift ideas over time. You can see all of them here.

So, Pinboard has been a savior in terms of moving things I’ve identified as being interesting and not losing track of them. Over time, I realized that there were two issues with it…

At times and for certain activities, putting something in Pinboard has given me a false sense of “completion” around something that needs to be done. Finding a good article on meditation, say, and tagging it, sort of gives me a sense that either, I’ve already read it and internalized it, or in some sense, I’ve already meditated…

Also, given that I’ve now tagged thousands of articles, I now have a treasure of curated resources - most of which I’ll never peruse. I’ve begun to solve for that issue with an interesting digital service called “Mailist”. Mailist sends me an email every Saturday with the inviting subject heading, “ Grab a coffee ☕️ and enjoy your reading - Mailist” and then randomly selects 10 of of the thousands of websites that I’ve archived and puts them in a list for me. It is a delightful weekly digital brain scrape - brings me back to the days when I was archiving articles on things like, “Can Robots Debone a Chicken?” and “The David Foster Wallace Audio Project”.

The convenience of Pinboard has also done me the slight disservice of making me think that I’ve brought order to complicated domains… by merely tagging something in “meditation”or “cogsci” I’ve grokked that territory. Somehow it feels as though I don’t need to write an article about it… or explain it to anybody because I’ve pulled together a set of resources that cohere under a unified tag.

So - the antidote to this particular vice is writing… and that is what this site (the one you are reading… VanEsselstyn.digital is meant to address. I’m going to attempt to better chronicle projects I’ve worked on, thoughts I’ve had, materials I’ve come across in a coherent way. Similar to Pinboard’s “social media for introverts” I’m not super interested in prostheletizing these musings, but it feels better to do it publicly than in a diary, so let’s start with that.