Breadcrumbs, orange peels and info droppings, oh my!

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I think I've treaded some of this same territory before (though I haven't yet found the markings). It would be nice to be able to arrive at a site I've visited previously - again, I'm dealing more with an interesting article than some pleasant site I like to visit - and be able to find the notes I made to myself about that same page when I was last there. Over the years I've seen one or two sites that permit this sort of on-site note-taking (perhaps it should be called "note-leaving") and I've even asked some technical people to attempt to prepare such an online tool for some of the sites I've worked on. I've been told that it's not particularly difficult, but it's never been a high priority item for people other than me.

Thanks to Firefox (the appearance and success of which may well become the subject of a future column) bookmarks may once again return to being the truly useful tool they once were. Many years ago, Netscape permitted us to not only create a link to a page as a bookmark, but also to add a description of that page. I seem to recall that it also allowed us to search within those descriptions (something that Firefox seems to not yet allow us to do, though I trust that such a possibility isn't far off in the future). I've known people who've used Notepad for saving notes on the pages they bookmark, and they can then run searches for phrases in the contents of those text files. But although I usually praise low-tech solutions that make good use of what's available to us, this particular digital solution seems to lack a certain desirable elegance.

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