Keywords = Tags
I use folders to give a bookmark a location where I can quickly navigate. For example, all my banking links are in the Finance folder. Folders provide a quick way to navigate to something as long as you remember where you stored it. In that case the bookmark is only one or two clicks away.
But what if I don't remember where I stored it? That's when search and keywords come into play. I type a keyword like "bank" and all bookmarks tagged with that keyword show up. Most of the time, the bookmark I was looking for appears right away.
Browsing vs. Searching
The scenario above describes a situation where I know what bookmark I want to use. But what about when I don't know the specific bookmark? For example, when researching a topic like XML, I search for "XML" in LinkaGoGo and start surfing from the result list. Or I navigate to a folder called XML. In general, I know what folders I have in LinkaGoGo.
So I use folders to navigate to something — either a particular bookmark or a folder about a topic. I use keywords as a fallback mechanism in search. Searching means typing, which in my case is most of the time slower than two mouse clicks. If I had a mechanism to quickly navigate my keywords with the mouse, things would get interesting.
The Keyword Browser Challenge
On other sites I've seen various solutions for navigating tags. There's the plain list of all tags — with 585 unique keywords for my bookmarks, that's not practical. Then there's the tag cloud variation used by Flickr and Technorati, showing tags with more links in a larger font. Another option is displaying the 20 tags with the most bookmarks, but that's not useful since it needs to be a complete list. I do like the del.icio.us approach where clicking a tag brings up a new list of tags based on the bookmarks for the selected tag.
What's Next
So the feature LinkaGoGo is missing is a good keyword browser to navigate your keywords. LinkaGoGo used to have one before the whole tag hype started, but it wasn't implemented in a useful way, so we removed it. The plan is to bring keyword navigation back to the site — possibly through some interactive development where we make a first version available to play with and refine it based on feedback.
With a keyword browser, LinkaGoGo can bridge both worlds and even cross between them: within the context of a keyword, look at available folders, or within a folder context, look at the available tags.