Old-fashioned school desks squeak, their occupants leaning for a better view. Dust motes hang suspended in the sunbeams from the classroom windows, as though they stilled, waiting for the confession. I stand before the group and gather my courage.
“My name is Jami Gold and I am a learning addict.”
As my posts about learning curves and being teachable make abundantly clear, I love learning. I love being challenged and pushing myself. Learning, adapting, evolving—it’s a great way to feel alive.
So I constantly look for new things to learn. It’s not unusual for me to have four different web browsers open. Yes, that means I have Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Opera all open at the same time. And I typically have 150-200 tabs open in Firefox at once. (Who needs 3D real-time games to push their computer to the edge? Not me.)
At least three-quarters of those tabs are articles or websites about writing. Those posts I find really interesting I share with my followers on Twitter. Those that inspire me to write more than a sentence or two I share with you here in a blog post.
In other words, I’m all about the sharing. I figure if I find something interesting, informative, or enjoyable, my friends will too. Because of that, I’ve often considered adding a round-up of the week’s best links to my blog.
Then my practical side kicks in. How would I keep track of all the links I share during the week to summarize the best? Those of you who follow me on Twitter know I share a lot of links.
Luckily, I recently discovered an awesome tool called trunk.ly. [Edited to add: Trunk.ly has since been acquired by Delicious and all links in this post have been switched to Delicious.] Trunk.ly scans my blog and Twitter feed and creates a link-only list. It collects links for every website or blog I reference in my posts, as well as for every one of my tweets that include a link.
Trunk.ly can also scan Facebook, Tumblr, or Instapaper. You can even put a button on your browser window to save a link to trunk.ly, just like saving a bookmark.
If you aren’t currently thinking “Cool,” let me explain the awesomeness of this tool with four words: The list is searchable.
If you can’t find the link to something you know I tweeted about, check out my trunk.ly list. My most recent tweets-with-links are at the top of the list. Looking for something less recent? Search for it by any of the words in the tweet or by #hashtag.
I’m now looking at my overwhelming bookmark folders on Firefox (which aren’t searchable) and thinking that this will make it easier for me to find stuff again. Forget trying to find a specific page in that mess, I’ll just search my trunk.ly list for whatever I’m looking for. As trunk.ly says on their About page, it “builds a personal search engine, so you never have to tag or describe a link again, you just search and Trunk.ly will find it again for you.”
I love Elizabeth Spann Craig’s Writer Knowledge Base, which is a writer-specific search engine. She tweets great links for writers every day and captures them in her WKB searchable database.
Trunk.ly is like a do-it-yourself version of that concept. If you sign up for trunk.ly, not only will you start your own personal search engine, but you can also follow someone else’s list and never miss any link they share again.
The best part? I don’t have to do anything to add to my list. When I tweet a link, that tweet is automagically copied to my trunk.ly list. In addition, now I have a list of everything I linked to during the past week, so if I ever wanted to start a “best links of the week” post, I have a handy reference.
Now are you with me on the coolness?
Are you a learning addict? How do you handle your addiction? Workshops? Books? Internet research? Do you use trunk.ly? Does this sound like an interesting tool? Do you have any tools you recommend?
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