Membranophonist’s Ramblings

This idea came to me as I was both using iTunes’s Smart Playlists and managing my bookmarks in Safari. Since both Safari and Camino’s bookmarks are stored in an XML format, I’m sure it is possible to add several useful meta-data types to them. A rating option and a comment field (already available in Camino) would be nice. XBEL does not appear to immediately support a rating system, but it could probably be added to the standard.

With an ever expanding collection of bookmarks, I find that there are quite a few sites that are worth bookmarking, but are not necessarily great or frequently updated/visited. OmniWeb allows you to set a custom site-update checking interval for every bookmark, but this is not very useful as an organizational metric. An “out of five stars” rating system would be easily understood by users and useful as a possible organizer. Ratings could be used to sort your bookmarks, allowing you to put your frequent visited sites at the tops of menus without having to manually arrange them.

If you have four sites with a five-star rating, how could you specify what order you wanted those four to appear in? iTunes handles this by simply ordering them alphabetically, but this takes a bit of control out of the user’s hands.

The type of list building and sorting that is available in iTunes playlists would be useful in many other applications, but it is dependent on there being a meta-data infrastructure. You can’t build a list based on nothing! Bookmarks themselves have very little meta-data by default - the name of the site is about it. If Apple would adopt and get involved in the expansion of XBEL as a cross-browser bookmark format, things might improve.