To tag or not to tag

I'm probably somewhat behind in finally exploring the possibility of using tags as a way of organising my bookmarks. I was still using IE6 until a couple of weeks ago I finally succumbed to all the messages telling me my browser was in urgent need of replacement and installed IE8. At a stroke, finding the right sub-folder to put a link in became a real headache as Microsoft in their wisdom had "improved" favorites and it was no longer possible to collapse the folders.

OK, so those of you who've been living with this for a while have adapted somehow - or left to explore other browsers, but my journey had just begun. I began by submitting a support ticket to Microsoft. I was amazed at the level of service but the guy trying to help me was incredulous at the complexity of the folder system I had set up and he could see why I was having problems. His suggested workaround was never going to work for me. If I achieved nothing more than my concerns being passed on to the project team for IE9 perhaps I will have achieved something.

Perhaps it was time to move into the world of social bookmarking and explore the possibility of finding links using tags not folders, so my next venture was to sign up for del.icio.us and install the Delicious Bookmarks add-on in Firefox. It was at this point that I realised I had some 4000 links stored in folders about 3 deep. It soon became apparent that letting the add-on choose tags for all these links was a big mistake. Any tag I chose to search for brought up a myriad of sites that did not contain the one I wanted.

Tags may be a brilliant idea if you are starting from scratch but for anyone with an existing hierarchy of bookmarks that works well, perhaps they are better used independently for new links until the point where you find that the old folders have become redundant. I'm not even sure I like the most recent version of Firefox. Suddenly you have to click once to bookmark the link and then again to choose where to store it and how to tag it. Perhaps next week I'll explore another browser. For now I might even go back to IE6!