Bookmarks are used as "personal Web information spaces" to help people remember and retrieve interesting Web pages. A study of personal Web information spaces surveyed 322 Web users and analyzed the bookmark archives of 50 Web users. The results of this study are used to address why people make bookmarks, and how they create, use, and organize them. Recommendations for improving the organization, visualization, representation, and integration of bookmarks are provided. The recommendations include simple mechanisms for filing bookmarks at creation time, the use of time-based visualizations with automated filters, the use of contextual information in representing bookmarks, and the combination of hierarchy formation and Web page authoring to aid in organizing and viewing bookmarks. Keywords WWW, bookmark, information space, survey, empirical study, design.
David Abrams, Ronald Baecker, Mark H. Chignell