the art of letting go.

how do i feel?  pretty okay.  honestly, it’s not bothering me that much.  odds are, i’d probably never get much use out of them anyway.

i’m one of the few (or maybe one of the many) who lost a lot of data when ma.gnolia went down last week.  it’s looking grim.  there are ways to recover stuff by parsing this and digging up that.  unfortunately, for me, i’ve got nothing to dig at.  none of my bookmarks were public.  none.  zero.  ”did you ever back them up?”  no, i didn’t.  yes, i’m quite savvy.  no, i wasn’t as responsible as i should’ve been with this data.  do i regret this?  mehhh.

zero out of, probably, several thousand.  at least three thousand.  probably somewhere around five.  these bookmarks had been carefully cultivated since 1993.  almost everything i ever wanted to “remember” on the web.  for the longest time, they sat on whichever computer i used.  when everyone started using delicious, i didn’t.  i couldn’t get into it.  not necessarily the concept, more the product.  i resisted the lucrative social bookmarking scene.  from afar, it mocked me with its overly useful community.

when i finally decided to “get social” with my stuff, and after much research, i settled on magnolia as a better product to use.  i didn’t care about the community on the site itself.  i cared more about the tools at my disposal.  they would let me do more of what i wanted to do.  jeff croft was a big part of this and, a considered authority, convinced me.

off i went, importing what i had and seeking out new.  nothing was public.  i wanted to meticulously tag, rate and give descriptions to all my bookmarks.  unleashing them on a web like a bag full ‘o awesome.  it never happened.  i certainly didn’t have the patience to do all of that to thousands and thousands of links.  would you?  i even considered hiring someone to do it for me.  occasionaly, i’d need to find something and i searched for it.  i either find it, or i didn’t.  if it wasn’t in ma.gnolia, it was in google notebook or google reader or on instapaper or in my e-mail.  it was always somewhere.

then, i lost them all.  at first, i did an “oh shit.”  i felt like i should be really mad.  there went all the “important stuff” out the window, and i’ll probably never get it back again.  that awesome recipe for the best pancakes ever?  gone.  the top 10 work-outs for people who never exercise?  gone.  what would i do.  a digital babylon, falling around me.

then, you know what?  i was okay with it.  still am.  i can’t explain it.  there is certainly lots of psychobabble i could go into about the connection we have to our “stuff.”  the digital infoglut, yadda, yadda, yadda.

maybe someday i’ll wish i had that link.  i’ll search for it.  the semantic web and search is and will be driving human interaction.  i trust i’ll be able to find it.  it’s all out there anyway, right?

do i start fresh?  maybe.  maybe not.  i have a few hundred things on google notebook that i’m not overly excited about clearing out before that bites the dust.  i have about 1,500 articles on instapaper.  it’ll all still sit there.  i won’t back it up.  i won’t fret about it.

i’ll use it when i need it and life will go on.