An overloaded favourites menu is a sign that the road to geek hell is paved with good intentions

Net Results: How could any geek not love a story with this headline: "New data says there's lots of new data".

According to researchers at the University of California, the world has about five exabytes of dusty electronic data stuffed into the digital equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer. Five exabytes may seem small - only five of something, after all - but five exabytes is the equivalent of five quintillion bytes.

The Americans define a quintillion as 10 to the 18th power. This number, according to an online maths dictionary, is called a "trillion" in Europe. A quintillion in Europe is 10 to the 30th power, which the Americans call a 'nonillion'.

So, let's just say that's one heck of a lot of zeroes, and one heck of a lot of data.

The story appeared on C/Net's tech news site, News.com, and of course I had to click through and then file it - therefore adding more data to the data I already have saved. You know, all those Web pages stored in a moment of enthusiasm in your browser "favourites".

So the story about data becomes yet another of those sites that I rarely take the time to place into proper folders and categories so that I can find them again. I don't know about you, but when my favourites menu drops down, it disappears off the bottom - and I mean way off the bottom - of my 21-inch monitor.

I have a nice stack of well-intentioned folders that I created so that my favourites would NOT resemble my kitchen junk drawer. But the folders hold only one or two sites and below them, in a disorderly sprawl, are inches and inches of random sites I wanted to preserve in case I needed them again, just like the bits of string, almost empty tape rolls, extra mobile phone chargers and singleton nails, screws and bolts scattered in the junk drawer.

As a result of this digital mess, I have to keep scrolling down to see the dregs of my delusions about what I would want to look at again. A seemingly endless well of good intentions gone astray.

That News.com story made me wonder what I'd considered important enough to give it harddrive space, and I can tell you, the results of a quick investigation aren't pretty.

I'd better get the most alarming confession done first. I actually found a folder called 'hair' that I do not remember ever creating (which is probably a good thing). Within it was a sole site: the Longlocks Boutique Hairstyle Gallery. What was I thinking? But let's move along - I am mindful of my father's rule at the dinner table: "No conversations about hair." Scanning the favourites column, I have to admit that lots of the sites I've saved are just dull. Undertaking this investigatory task, I'd believed my favourites would be a compendium of sprightly, intelligent websites, spiced up with the occasionally quirky but charming URL.

Sometimes, yes. But there are some real yawn-inducers. For example, at some point I decided I needed to forever be able to find the population of the cities and towns of Ireland, and stored a website that gives that information (no doubt so that during a dinner party I could whip out my laptop and immediately settle a burning row over how many people live in Bagenalstown). And I'm sure I once thought I might pay lots of visits to the website for the European Parliament Office in Ireland.

Yes, those stored websites sure reveal one's personality - for better or worse. My geek pretensions and weaknesses are laid out for anyone to see: the link to the NewToLinux website, the Elder Geek questions and answers site, the Send A Geek Card! Website, and Scrounge.org's "Folk Computing for a New Millennium" ("how to acquire cheap hardware and what to do with it once you've got it").

Further down the favourites list, there's a website all about megalithic cairns in Ireland, about housetraining a puppy and about how to fix a noisy fan in a PC. About 45 different sites featuring technology news of some sort.

And a place that shows the results of all the ongoing political polls in the United States. And about 60 more sites that I'll probably never look at again.

Oh yes: and a site about efficiently organising your browser favourites.

Really. Which I think I'd better go do right now, just as soon as I delete that 'hair' folder.

Weblog: http://weblog.techno-culture.com