Internet News

Stumbleupon adopts iframes

StumbleUpon Kills Direct Links, iFrames Everything, Brent Csutoras, Search Engine Land (Feb 1)

Stumbleupon has undergone a redesign so that as users stumble through sites that match up to their interests (theoretically - depends on how other stumblers tag what they find) they will stay inside the Stumbleupon frame.

Oh - that's not going to go down well. Many sites have done that and regretted it.

"One particular change that really surprised me was the removal of all direct links pointing back to the content sources from within StumbleUpon.

Instead on all content pages within StumbleUpon, you have a single button saying ‘Stumble This’, which when clicked takes you to an iframed version of the content."

Of interest: Stumbleupon has 20 million "users".

Facebook and frictionless sharing

"Frictionless sharing" - exploring the changes to Facebook, Martin Belam, Fumsi (Jan 3)

It's hard to stay on top of changes at Facebook. Is it helping people manage the flood of information or making it worse?

The issue is the Facebook "reading app" which news media outlets have been inserting which invite you to install when you want to read an article. These apps come with "seamless sharing" - or "frictionless sharing" that will post everything you read at that site to your Facebook stream

Martin Belam asks, "So what does that mean for the information professional?"

+ news sources should look into Facebook's uses the Open Graph metadata standard to display shared items
+ watch "audit trails"

The new Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon Redesigned: New Branding, StumbleBar And Channels For Celebs & Brands, Marketing Land (Dec 6)

Stumbleupon goes beyond bookmarkiing and discovery - it is now "social aggregation"

"StumbleUpon has been one of the most successful social aggregation services to date with more than 20 million users and 1.2 billion “stumbles” each month. The true blue and electric green circular logo has been one of the most recognizable social logos … and today it is changing."

New branding, new design, new search facility - and few brands and celebrities have been given room in a separate channel to "curate" content.

Could be worth a look.

New York Times on Google Plus

HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog, HubSpot blog (Nov 11)

So this is what business pages in Google Plus can look like!

Check the New York Times. If you use Google+, you may want to add it to your "circle".

"In October, the earth's population surpassed 7 billion, and The New York Times is using its Google+ business page to source photos for its latest crowdsourcing project "Picturing 7 Billion." Aside from it being a cool project, it serves as an example of a company customizing its page based on follower feedback, who said they were looking for international news and photos on the Google+ business page."

Stumbleupon steaming ahead

StumbleUpon: 20 Million Stumblers & Counting, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 12)

20 million people using stumpleupon at 2000 stumbles a second - impressive - this social bookmarking (of sorts) is holding up to the competition.

Diigo - excellent for groups

Classroom Collaboration Using Social Bookmarking Service Diigo By Michael F. Ruffini, Educause (Vol 34, Number 3, 2011)

Diigo - recommended for any group doing collaborative research work on the web.

"Among social bookmarking services, Diigo has features and functions that make it useful for the classroom, giving instructors tools for setting up groups of students, highlighting key information, and commenting. "

Full description of Diigo (even of premium features) with screenshots.

delicious tag bundles are gone

Delicious Re-launch Riddled With Bugs, Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News via PC World (Sep 29)

The upgrade to delicious did not go well for Avos, the new owner.

"According to the latest update from Avos, some users are still missing bookmarks and tags, which the company says it will restore. Browser extensions for Internet Explorer and Chrome are still broken, but the one for Firefox should now be working.

In addition to malfunctions and missing data, users are complaining about missing features, particularly many associated with managing bookmark tags, such as for creating tag bundles, editing tag descriptions, and renaming and deleting tags.

The Delicious Help page has an FAQ that details the status of the missing features and the company's plans for them, such as whether they will be restored or left out."

If delicious doesn't restore the tag bundles, it will be tossed by the librarian community. Doesn't anyone study user habits?

Plans for delicious

Social Bookmarking Rises Again With Delicious Remake By Angela West, PCWorld (Sep 13)

There's hope for Delicious yet - the new owners intend a revamp that will bring this site for favourites uptodate with today's social preferences.

"Hurley and Chen get that, and they tell The New York Times about revamping Delicious to marry the best of news aggregation and social bookmarking. In addition, they want to foster community by allowing users to interact and share with each other, all the while mapping this behavior so that they can monetize the site with laser-focused advertising. With YouTube, Hurley and Chen learned the value of building community, and they bring that awareness to Delicious."

Facebook's Smart Lists

Facebook to organize friends in smart lists , AP via Globe and Mail (Sep 13)

Good - Facebook will start organizing your friends into smaller groups. It has its own rules for doing this - and presumably we can move people from one "smart list" to another.

"You can also create your own groups. For example, you can list a dozen or so “close friends” and see more of their updates than those in your list of “acquaintances.”"

Google+ Happenings

This Week On Google+: Suggested Users, API Delays & Measuring Google+ Influence!, Greg Finn, Search Engine Land (Sep 6)

Lots new at Google+

Search Stumbleupon

With Its New Explore Box, StumbleUpon Adds Search To Content Discovery, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 17)

Ah finally - we don't have to rely on Stumpleupon reading our minds - we can actually search its collection.

"It can be accessed at www.stumbleupon.com/explore or, if you’re logged in, at the StumbleUpon home page."

Stumpleupon testing a new explore

StumbleUpon Testing New ‘Explore Box’ Search Tool, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 21)

Stumpleupon is testing a new explore box - "he Explore search box shows suggested topics as you type (see image at right), while the toolbar search shows previous tags that you’ve used when stumbling. "

Personal content curation

9 content curation tools that better organise the web., Paul Anthony, webdistortion (Mar 10)

Who knew that "curating" a topic on the Web would get such a boost - even as private bookmarking is in decline. This article gives us 9 more tools for linking stories and pulling in news streams. Most connect to Facebook and Twitter, and they tend to be more for filtering material for yourself rather than building for others.

+ Eqentia - "a personal content curation and aggregation platform" Explore the content channels.

+ Pearltrees - individual collections and group - build into networks of people interested in same topics.

+ Scoop.it - build a topic, follow others. This page by Robin Good is good example of what can be done. Among the followed topics is Web Content and Digital Curation.

+ Keepstream - get tweets, add tweets, embed in your blog post.

Curation with Pearltrees

Pearltrees brings curation to next level, adds Team feature, Sam Diaz, ZDNet (Dec 7, 2010)

Just as directories are dying (Intute in the UK being abandoned, Open Directory severely neglected, Yahoo Directory closed in some countries, the guides in Mahalo loaded with spam - to name a few) the concept of curation begins to appear in articles.

"Sure, there’s your basic Web search and then there’s aggregation, similar to what Google and Yahoo do with news headlines. But another form of information discovery is starting to gain some momentum: curation."

Curation - content curation, personal curation, social curation. Bookmarks are a form of curation - and shared bookmarks have had a "wisdom of the crowd" power. Curation goes further - perhaps - with some additional work to annotate, organize, and likely share.

Further clarification on curation vs aggregation in this article - Curation versus aggregation represents human web versus machine web...

"Curation is a person or persons, engaged in the act of choosing and presenting things related to a specific topic and context."

"Aggregation is the collection of as many things that can be found related to a topic."

Pearltrees is a new "social curation community" - "pearl" what you like - and connect with other people who are building pearl tress around the same items. Of course, you can also just explore other people's trees in ways that are much easier than working with delicious.

Patrice Lamothe, CEO of Pearltrees, wrote Curation - The Third Web Frontier (Jan 8, 2011) - found be exploring trees on curation. He sees sees the next phase of Web use being one that enables " everyone to organize the entire collection of documents." And that "For many web enthusiasts, reading content provided by a community is replacing information from automated aggregators."

Librarians as intermediaries - trained in selection, evaluation, and indexing - are not necessarily lost in this world, but they should act quickly to be in the game.

Bookmarking and sharing links

The best bookmarking tools right now, Pandia (May 1)

Delicious and Diigo are named as the main online social bookmarking tools, with a nod to Pinboard as another but less social tool. To this I would add and recommend Xmarks.com which also keeps the bookmarks synchronized across browsers, backed up online, and can be used as a base for recommendations.

Pandia also mentions that many people are using Twitter and Facebook to share links - to search those Trunk.ly may be the best tool.

Delicious sold to AVOS

YouTube Founders Buy Delicious; First Step To Taking On Google?, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (April 27)

Founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, are going to buy Delicious. Quoting from the press release - "They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web." This is supposed to happen by July.

Delicious users are receiving emails now asking them to agree to have their bookmarks transferred to the new company, AVOS. Delicious will continue to be available in its current form until July 2011. If you don't agreed to the transfer by then, you will lose access.

In the main I see this as good news for delicious users - and now that there is a secure future maybe some will come back to the fold.

But there is competition. XMarks does a very good job synching bookmarks and integrating with search. Diigo is excellent for online bookmarking and sharing. Evernote goes beyond and saves content in addition to the link. Good luck delicious - perhaps you'll wow us all.

Delicious might have a buyer

Exclusive: Yahoo Is About To Sell Delicious For $1-$2 Million, Jay Yarow, Business Insider (Mar 17)

Don't know who or when - but rumour has it that someone will buy Delicious.

Of interest: "Our source says Delicious has zero monetization, but it's one of the most highly regarded products at Yahoo. People are very loyal to the product, and Yahoo says it's the most widely used internal property at Yahoo."

Someday Yahoo will regret doing this.

Google Bookmarks and Delicious

Google Unveils Delicious Bookmark Importer, Jolie O'Dell, Mashable (Feb 18)

Google invites Delicious users to import their bookmarks (including tags) into Google Bookmarks. This follows Yahoo's announcement of some weeks ago that Yahoo was intending to shutter delicious (later amended to try to find another caretaker).

Before you do this (say I), realize that Google Bookmarks is not at all like delicious.

1. bookmarks are private - unless you create a list and make the list public.
2. you can star items to add to the bookmark list in Google, but that doesn't prompt for label or note. Need to put the bookmarklet on your toolbar (tho need bookmarklet for delicious too.)
3. Google doesn't offer methods to group the tags / labels. Although it does now offer a way to remove and change labels.
4. You can search the public lists with keywords but not pivot on a label (there are none) or on a user (to see what else they collect).

Anyone who has loved delicious for its bookmark management tools and the ability to check what thousands of collectors were finding and adding will be disappointed. Better to look to Diigo for a new bookmark management system (full toolbar, save larger chunks of text), or Xmarks (synchronize bookmarks across browsers and computers - while also anonymously contributing to evaluation of sites and page.

Google Bookmarks is possibly the clunkiest bookmark manager invented. It's handy for quickly starring pages that will show in Google History as of interest to you - and maybe it helps Google personalize results - but it doesn't have the interface or capabilities to make it your main bookmark tool.

Crowd Sourced Alternatives to Delicious

Crowdsourcing Alternatives To Delicious, Open Thinkiing (Dec 16)

Here's a wonderful example of what people (strangers actually) can do with collaborative technology as they share what they know and recommend through Google docs a wiki-like document that lists alternatives to delicious. It all began with a tweet.

Alternatives to delicious

28 delicious alternatives to Delicious, Phil Bradley (Dec 17)

Good list - also points to Lifehacker for information on how to download your delicious bookmarks into your browser.

Yahoo Closing Services

Yahoo is finally closing Altavista and Alltheweb - good - they had lost their function several years ago when Yahoo built its own search. Now Yahoo doesn't have a database, so why keep these two rusting hulks?

It is closing Yahoo Buzz - ah well - there are lots of trends-based products around today.

But this rumour about closing delicious is worrisome. Later statements from Yahoo indicate that it will look for a buyert (especially since there was such an outcry at the leak about shutting it down). But, how much will delicious users trust it now - or any of the social bookmarking services?

Confirmed: Yahoo Closing Buzz, Traffic APIs – Maybe Delicious & AltaVista, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 16)

But on a brighter note, maybe not - maybe Yahoo will find a buyer. Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 17)

Xmarks Carries On

Xmarks: Alive and Kicking, XMarks blog (Nov 4)

Xmarks, the wonderful online tool for syncing bookmarks across machines and browsers, has a reprieve. A new owner came to the rescue - let's hope for the long term.

Custom Search thru Delicious

Delicious-to-Blekko search conversion hack, P@Log (Oct 31)

Create a custom search engine from your delicious bookmarks.

Bookmarking

3 innovative bookmarking tools, Pandia (Oct 31)

Susanne at Pandia is a keen user of online bookmarking programs - Delicious specifically.

Here she describes three new tools.

+ Amplify - "a bookmarklet that lets you select text and images from a web page and save it all to your account with tags and comments. But it is also a tool for sharing these clips: "

+ Gravee - "social search engine". Pandia describes it as "a metasearch engine that personalizes your search results. The personalization is based on interests and preferences you might have stated in your account, bookmarking, tagging, and voting activity as well as those of your friends (if you choose to connect to other people on Gravee)."

+ Hooey - "a kind of browsing archive" as a desktop application.

Google Bookmark Lists

Find Great Pages Using Google Bookmarks, Google Operating System (Oct 21)

If you use MyGoogle you probably use the bookmarks - sometimes. You can share these by making lists or make them public.

"The nice thing about public bookmark lists is that they're searchable and you can find them below your Google Bookmarks search results."

Google Operating Systems shows how to make a Google Bookmarks List

Diigo added Premium Accounts

Diigo Releases Premium Accounts, Diigo Blog (Sept 6)

I wondered why I no longer saw the box to save a page when bookmarking it - Diigo turned that into a premium feature. The announcement doesn't say much but the price page does. $40 / month for all features that includes capture and annotate screenshots.

Xmarks future not bright

Xmarks CEO: Knight-in-shining-armor rescue likely, Rafe's Radar (Oct 7)

Maybe some company will acquire, or maybe users will pledge enough money, but Rafe Needleman thinks the service fo syncing bookmarks and passwords is doomed anyway.

"The product that Xmarks' fans want to keep alive is its cross-browser bookmark synchronization service. Unfortunately for Xmarks, bookmark sync is being built in to today's browsers (Firefox and Chrome so far). While browsers' built-in sync functions aren't completely competitive in that they're not cross-browser (you can't sync Firefox to Chrome as you can with the Xmarks add-ins), Joaquin admits that 75 percent of Xmarks' users only use a single browser."

Saving Xmarks

Xmarks may live on, in paid form, by Josh Lowensohn, Web Crawler (Sept 30)

Xmarks, the online bookmark synchronizing service, might live on if 100,000 people would be willing to pay $15 to 20 a year. Deadline to pledge is October 15 to sign up.

5 Bookmark Managers

Five Best Bookmark Management Tools, Lifehacker (May 17)

We've come a long way from Netscape bookmarks. Today we can sync them across machines and browsers, share with people we know, share with anyone, not share at all and still benefit from social power. This article names 5:

+ delicious - size of collection makes it good for searching. OK as a bookmark manager, though I find tag and bundle management awkward.

+ Diigo - excellent for forming groups of shared interest where everyone contributes. Also has excellent bookmark management. Not as easy at Diigo to search "the community library" for bookmarks by all Diigo users as it is at delicious.

+ Xmarks - excellent for syncing bookmarks across everything - and for enhancing search results. Can share folders.

+ Weave - for syncing Firefox bookmarks. (New to me).

+ Google Bookmarks - mainly private but you can create public lists. Can also add notes. Google uses your bookmarks to personalize your search results.

Stumbleupon going strong

StumbleUpon By the Numbers by Stumbleupon Blog (May 4)

Stumbleupon believes in serendipity on the web. Owned for a while by eBay, it is on its own again and has been growing in users and recommendations. There are 9.9 million registered users.

Being private in Facebook

Facebook Privacy: 8 Ways to Protect Yourself, by Dan Costa, PCMag (Apr 28)

Slideshow on the steps to take to ensure your Facebook privacy.

Globe and Mail adds Facebook

The Globe's new Facebook features , Globe and Mail (Apr 21)

Globe and Mail gets with the social media program.

"The Globe and Mail has introduced new Facebook features to create a more personalized and social user experience at our website. Using Facebook’s new Social Plugins, The Globe has developed a more vibrant and interactive community, allowing readers to connect with millions of Facebook users, share and recommend content and follow friends’ activities and “Likes”, without leaving Globeandmail.com."

Xmarks looks at paid-search

Social Bookmarking Service Xmarks Adds Ratings To Search Ads, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Apr 8)

Xmarks adds star ratings in an overlay on paid-search ads in Google and Bing based on number of times a site has been bookmarked and on ratings on that site. An advertiser must subscribe to the service to have this show for their products. And the user must have the toolbar installed.

Of interest: "Xmarks active user base is currently 4 million people, and that the company manages a database of more than one billion bookmarks consisting of 350 million URLs. Xmarks users conduct roughly half a billion searches per month."

Google Bookmarks now Social

Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Operating System (Mar 24)

Google Bookmark users can create lists of bookmarks and share with selected others. This is somewhat similar to what could be done in Google Notebooks (closed).

The "lists" seem a little different and have an alerting side - revieve updates by email.

"Like labels, lists let you organize your stuff into categories. But they can do so much more! For example, lists have the smarts to pull the most important information (like maps and reviews) from the sites you care about, and put it in a single place. You can easily see when a site in your list has been updated."

Video shows how [2.49 min]

Google Bookmarks at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/l

New Digg Soon

New Version of Digg Revealed by Ben Parr, Mashable (Mar 14)

Digg, described as a social bookmarking site in this article, is soon to move to a new version.

Digg is social bookmarking for news articles and postings - number of diggs means more popular. Digg users can use its recommendation engine.

Coming soon:

+ personalized feeds
+ leaderboard of top users
+ ability to submit news items with one click

Alpha version available if you register.

Improved Handling at Delicious

Filter and browse, Delicious Blog (Jan 28)

Delicious has made further improvements to display and browse features making handling easier and display more pleasing.

+ Control display options for sorting and amount of detail. Look for small tabs - under Bookmarks you'll see Display Options; and beside Tags in the the right Tag panel, Options.

+ Use privacy filter - public or private bookmarks.

+ Open bookmarks in new window.

+ Browse these bookmarks - best of all - page through bookmarks one page at a time in a separate viewer.

+ Tag options - much better handling of tags (rename, manage bundles, delete) and choices for display (cloud, list), and sorting.

CiteULike and DeepDyve

Search for Scholarly Journals on CiteULike with DeepDyve, Altsearchengines (Jan 14)

Researchers may find this new partnership between the scholary social bookmarking service, CiteULike, with DeepDyve Deep Web search engine.

"Through its partnership with DeepDyve, CiteULike now offers its users a simple way to rent and read the journal articles they discover for as little as $0.99. With nearly one million visitors per month, CiteULike is a rapidly growing community of like-minded people who seek out scholarly information on the Internet. With one click, users can bookmark articles of interest into their personal library and automatically save the citation details. Users can also share their library with others, as well as find out who is reading the same articles."

Mendeley Research Management

Search for research trends with Mendeley, Altsearchengines (Dec 5)

Mendeley is research management tool intended for academic researchers. This is software for managing documents and a networking tool for sharing with colleagues.

+ Connect with other researchers in your field - navigate their "web of knowledge"

+ "Collaborate with fellow researchers and share information, resources and experiences with shared and public collections."

+ "Mendeley Desktop is academic software that indexes and organizes all of your PDF documents and research papers into your own personal digital bibliography."

Stumbleupon Getting Friendlier

StumbleUpon Gets a Facelift: Nips, Tucks, and a Streamlined UI by Jolie O'Dell, Read Write Web (Oct 28)

Stumbleupon is beta testing a new interface.

"The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam."

Yahoo ID Accepted at Delicious

Delicious is now about Y!ou too , delicious blog (Oct 19)

Amazing that it took Yahoo so long to make it possible for Yahoo account users to directly use delicious, which Yahoo owns.

"That’s right, after a few years under Yahoo!’s wing we’re finally ready to start supporting Yahoo! ID and increase our reach for Delicious and Yahoo! users together. So for those of you who held off Delicious registration because you didn’t want yet another combination of username and password that you’d never remember, you can now register a Delicious account using your Yahoo! ID!"

Update on Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon Recasts Itself As A Social Search Engine “Between Google And Twitter.” by Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (Oct 8)

Update on Stumbleupon:

"About 8 million people a month use StumbleUpon, says Camp, to bookmark and share the best sites on the Web. More than 35 million Web pages have been stumbled, and now the company has indexed them all to make them more searchable. The homepage has also been simplified to show you a stream of pages recently stumbled by people you know."

"Traditionally, people went to StumbleUpon to randomly flip through interesting pages, but now it works more like a proper search engine. Except that it only returns pages already deemed to be worthy by the StumbleUpon community, and then within those results it shows you the pages that only people you subscribe to have Stumbled, rated, or reviewed. In that sense, it is like Yahoo’s now-defunct MyWeb experiment (but with actual users)."

Postscript: New StumbleUpon Adds Search, Social Elements by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 9) - describes new features.

Delicious Enhancements

Delicious' New Flavors: Refined Search, Interactive Graphs, & Much More by Jolie O'Dell, Read Write Web (Sept 30)

Lots happening at Delicious.

+ search results page has new filters and graphs. Eg restaurants toronto
+ search for bookmarks made in the last few minutes
+ recipient tags - show that a bookmark was sent to Twitter or a friend
+ use a to:read tag
+ delicious page on a url now has a graph showing when that url was bookmarked by users.

Delicious describes the changes on its what's new page.

Stumbleupon interface simpler

Preview of StumbleUpon’s Upcoming Site Changes, Search Engine Journal (Sep 24)

Stumbleupon is adopting a new interface. The posting compares the current homepage to the beta. Aim seems to have been to make it simpler.

Quoted - "“The new design is simpler, more social and search-able. It preserves the functionality of the previous interface while adding the most frequently requested features. The new version is now available to Beta Group members, and will be accessible to the entire community soon.”"

Using Social Sites

Find and Share information on the Internet : Part 1 by Malcolm Coles, FUMSI (APril 2009)

Malcolm Coles is right - the Internet is nothing like a library. But never mind, we can find a "community of like-minded people". So - we're talking social sites, and he refers to Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, delicious, Twitter.

Has a good exercise to search delicious for FUMSI.

In Part II , he puts forward that "Sites like Twitter and alternative social sites where users can submit and recommend content, like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious, are increasingly replacing traditional ways of finding information on the Internet."

There are some problems with these tools as information sources - bias and herd mentality being two.

I think it possible though to argue that these might help in finding relevant material especially on popular topics and current ones.

Delicious Improved

Yahoo Makes Delicious.com Cool Again by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 4)

Delicious now has "fresh bookmarks" as the default view - must think that people absolutely crave everything from the last few minutes. Of course, it also has "recent tweets".

There is "improved sharing". Can send a bookmark through email, or (wait for it) Twitter.

Then for something more useful, there is an improved search engine.

"Delicious now shows suggested searches, a “filter by tag” option, and a timeline-based chart that reveals when pages matching your keyword have been saved. This last feature makes it an important indicator of what you could call Delicious.com Trends."

ResearchBuzz covered this in Delicious: Now With Less Punctuation, More Search Offerings (Aug 11)

More later ..

Become a Stumbleupon Power User

StumbleUpon Essential Basics, A Beginners Guide, by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Marketing Group (May 8)

Tells us a lot about Stumbleupon - such as - "StumbleUpon is based on the relevance mechanism: each member is categorized based on his interests - these interests are determined based on the preferences specified by him and also based on the member’s browsing behavior (topics of the articles the member usually stumbles and reviews)."

"

What to look for in bookmarking tool

Helping Google Build a Better Bookmarking Tool by Michael Gray (Mar 31)

Useful for the list of requirements from a bookmarking tool:

* Store all of the sites/links I visit/use regularly
* Store in a separate “bucket” the sites I want to keep as a reference for the future
* Tags, send to a friend, share
* Keep a cache/archive of the sites in case they go offline
* Have the ability to search the pages I have bookmarked for text I put in
* Sync or backup more than one computer to the cloud
* Store MULTIPLE (double bold double underline) passwords per website and sync/backup to the cloud

Add to this a way to define your own group and share inside it; and a way to have some controlled vocabulary to help in tagging consistently.

Diigo absorbs Furl

Furl.net, one of the early personal tools for bookmarking, adding notes, and saving pages, has closed. This was owned by Looksmart at one time, and expanded to include FindArticles. The announcement at the site refers people to Diigo.com, an up-and-coming service.

Furl users can import their pages into Diigo and create an account in one shot.

Pandia picks 5 social bookmarking tools

The 5 best online bookmarking services, Pandia (Mar 4)

Pandia revisited its selection of top social bookmarking tools. They do test and review many. The selection criteria given in this article are good.

+ Diigo is much more powerful than I realized - "Diigo has a group tool for collaborative research that allows groups of people to pool their findings through shared bookmarks, highlights, sticky notes, and forum discussions."

+ Delicious has mass and some new search features.

+ Furl (it's still on the list!) - saves pages and makes recommendations

+ Mister Wong - better known in Europe.

+ Simpy - can store notes.

Tools for Delicious

Tools to Analyze Delicious Tags, Bookmarks and URLs by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Feb 10

Decribes several tools for getting more value from delicious. Most are visual-aid tools such as the delicious tag browser and Revealicious . Article is well illustrated and with good descriptions. Delicious users will want to try several.

Yahoo MyWeb to close

Yahoo MyWeb bites the dust by Elinor Mills, CNet (Feb 13)

Unlucky Friday for users of Yahoo's MyWeb - it will be closed on March 18. Yahoo was among the first to introduce the bookmarking, saving, sharing service in the early days of social web. It was an admirable product - but then it languished. Yahoo has been pushing users to delicious (which has improved) and Yahoo Bookmarks.

Quitera for Search

Social Bookmarking Service Qitera Now Integrates With Google and Yahoo Search by Frederic Lardinois, ReadWriteWeb (Jan 27)

Qitera, a new social bookmarking tool that can work behind a firewall, also has good search functionality. A new plug-in automatically searches your bookmarks as well as the web.

Magnolia out of service

Failure Friday: Red Herring, Magnolia, and Pageflakes go dark by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Jan 30)

Some favourite sites are in trouble -- "As of Friday morning, technology news site Red Herring, widget start page service Pageflakes, and social bookmarking site Magnolia were all unavailable. "

For Magnolia, things are looking grim. "Early Friday, the social-bookmarking site experienced data corruption and loss, which the company says will take "weeks" to sort out. In the meantime, the service has shuttered its Web front-end and closed external access to its APIs while its database is re-organized."

ZigTag - improved tagging

ZigTag - new social bookmarking tool that helps users improve the tagging they do by offering "defined tags" to choose from as well as the ability to add "undefined tags" (ie user terms).

Defined tags come from a dropdown list and are to be used to provide a "distinct meaning" to a tag that can have multiple meanings. To use the Zigtag example, New York might be a city, a state, or a song.

From ZigTag:

"Having defined tags reduces the need for multiple tags to properly classify and find content on the Internet thus creating a connected web much easier and faster than ever before. Adding multiple defined tags to bookmarks only strengthens the relationship enabling users to find more relavent content on the topic they were searching. Zigtag is redefining the term relevant on the Internet!"

Of course ZIgTag will be social - you can import contacts from MS Outlook or Gmail.

To get you started you can also import your collection from Delicious.

Sounds like a good deal.

Mentioned in Daily Tidbits: Delicious gets some 'intelligent' competition by Don Reisinger, Webware (Dec 29)

Searching Delicious

The state of the Delicious hive mind in 2008 (Dec 18).

Figures on what people searched for at delicious during 2008 placed several web-related topics in the top 10: CSS (cascading style sheets), wikis, blogs, web 2.0 - indicating, to me, that they might have been looking for resources - good wikis, or good blogs, although the commentary at the delicious post shows that results include software and how-to guides.

Top Ten Search Terms at Delicious 2008
• news
• blogs
• reference
• wiki
• restaurants
• hotels
• CSS
• Web 2.0
• artists
• music

But they also searched for restaurants and hotels, which surprised me, given all the TripAdvisor and Yelp-kind of sites where people post ratings and comments. However, delicious users are bookmarking resource sites. The results for restaurant do look good with Yelp, OpenTable, and Zagat on the list.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web - Delicious Top Searches of 2008 Aren't What You'd Expect - commented that, "There is a big disconnect between what people submit to the site and what people go there looking for. " Delicious tends to be "geeky". Therefore, why would people search for news or restaurants?

There could be a disconnect, but I think people would adjust their sights quickly to comprehend what delicious offers. Although there may be a geeky / tech component, there is also a stong consumer leaning (which some see as a serious failing).

Stephen Shankland at Webware concluded that Search results show Delicious remains a tech niche (Dec 19) - He wrote, "For CSS to be in the top 10 indicates to me at least that the mainstream searches for music and the like are probably something techies do rather than a reflection that mainstream folks are using the site much. " Maybe.

Kirkpatrick warns that searching delicious broadly isn't worth much because "it's hard to know what you are getting". Instead he uses the direct technique of working with the url -- http://delicious.com/tag/blog+ceramics.

You can use the Tag Search at delicious to accomplish the same thing - Explore Tags for the words blog ceramics.

One thing is clear, this is a different class of searcher - there are no celebrities on the list and no pop-culture as dominate the web-search lists such as Yahoo's 2008 in Review

Qitera for research

Qitera: Social Bookmarking for the Deep Web by Frederic Lardinois, ReadWriteWeb (Dec 5)

Qitera - another social bookmarking tool but with a new twist - "Qitera is probably best understood as an interesting mashup of Furl, delicious, and Twine, with a little bit of Iterasi thrown in for good measure." Seen to be a

Bookmarking Sites

20 Bookmarking Sites You Need To Know About at Search Marketing Standard (Dec 8)

There is more to social bookmarking than delicious - here are 19 more.

Bookmark and play mp3 through Delicious

Delicious Has A Brand New Audio Player For MP3 Bookmarks by Robin Wauters, TechCrunch (Dec 6)

Delicious, the social bookmarking tools, has added "a brand new audio player to play your MP3 bookmarks inside the browser."

Scholarly Social Bookmarking

3 social bookmarking tools for research collaboration, Pandia (Nov 26)

Three tools that will let you "register a wide range of bibliographic information" and also "facilitate online research collaboration and networking": Zortero, 2Collab, and Connotea.

Susanne Koch also gives out the url for her delicious collection.

Stumbleupon's Success

StumbleUpon Trying To Move From Web 2.0 Novelty To Real Business by Dan Frommer, Silicon Alley Insider (Oct 1)

Some figures on Stumbleupon - "The site boasts 6 million users -- triple its 2 million when eBay bought it in April, 2007 -- who "stumble" onto some 350 million Web pages a month through the service." It also makes $10.5 million in annual sales.

In addition to dropping the requirement to use the toolbar, Stumbleupon has been partnering with content sites.

"Another potential growth driver: Partnerships with sites like The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic, which will put StumbleUpon widgets onto their sites so people can "stumble" onto other pages they might like on the site. For instance, a Huffington Post reader who has given the thumbs-up to a bunch of Sarah Palin stories could stumble onto another popular Sarah Palin story. This is beneficial for all parties: The user, in theory, sees more neat stuff; the publisher, in theory, gets more pageviews; and StumbleUpon, in theory, gets more users to sign up."

Delicious at 5 years

A Delicious Anniversary, Yahoo Search Blog (Nov 6)

Some numbers about Delicious:

+ 180 million urls tagged
+ 5.3 million users
+ 5 years old.

Ma.gnolia -

Ma.gnolia.com has refreshed itself, made the search function work again, become more social - and all in all is a viable and attractive alternative to delicious for social bookmarking.

There is a lot you can do now - save and view your own bookmarks, view by tags, watch what other people save and tag, tap into groups - and now see all of this through a "streamview".

Their October newsletter (oddly - not available at the site yet) outlined --

"Ma.gnolia 2 will embrace a stronger focus on recent activity of the groups and people you're interested in, rather than deep collections of bookmarks. It's a big shift, so we decided to start playing with that idea in the current Ma.gnolia by changing the personal homepage to an activity feed format.

This new format collects recent activities from the people and groups you follow, like joining a group, adding a bookmark or following a new person, and presents them in a tidy but informative view. As people and groups you're connected to do more, the more you see in your homepage."

Magnolia has a Discover button to make it easier to review Recent Bookmarks, Popular Bookmarks (web design is high), Top tags, Applications.

On the matter of top tags, homercocktail is very high - a username for someone who has a taste for pop culture and has added many videos to YouTube and then saved them as bookmarks to Magnolia. Might not be your pick, but there could be other users and groups using Magnolia that match your interests.

There is the Literary Studies and the Digital Library group. This is a good example of how the group mechanics can be used well - a group of graduates students, faculty, and library came together to discuss changes in humanities research. Unfortunately for others, activity ended in late 2007.

Poke around in Ma.gnolia for a bit, and try the tools out - you might find it a good social collaboration tool to use it with a group of colleagues when doing research, building a collection, and discussing points.

Stumbleupon without a toolbar

StumbleUpon 2.0: Good-bye, software toolbar by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Sept 30)

"... StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you're on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything."

Search del.icio.us with Del.izzy

Del.izzy adds search functionality to Delicious Pandia (Aug 26)

Del.izzy searches delicious bookmarks. Good thing because the search at delicious is not very good.

From Del.izzy - "del.izzy lets you search through all content, including title, description and page content, for all your bookmarks."

Ma.gnolia

Bookmarking service Magnolia opens up its source to all By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Aug 22)

Social bookmarking service Magnolia is still in business. It has announced that it will "to open up its source code to let anyone add its bookmarking functionality to their site or private organization."

Search function appears to have improved as well.

A Social Blog Reader

Google Reader gets more social networky By Bob Walsh, Webware (AUg 13)

Google offers people who use Google Reader for reading feeds a way to share specific articles with others in the Google member universe.

"Users of Google's RSS reader got a new social networking feature today: the capability to selectively pick and choose who of your Gmail/Gtalk friends get first crack at the items you want to share."

New Delicious

Del.licio.us Now Delicious.com, With Improvements b yBarry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 31)

There is a new delicious.com - faster, better search, improved RSS.

Also, Yahoo gives Delicious more speed, fewer punctuation marks By Stephen Shankland, Webware (Jul 31)

+ 5 million users

Study into Tagging

Tagging tagging. Analysing user keywords in scientific bibliography management systems by Christian Wolff, Markus Heckner, Susanne Mühlbacher, Journal of Digital Information (Vol 9 No 27, 2008)

Studied the use of tags at Connotea, a social bookmarking tool geared to academic users for scientific bibliographies.

"Our findings show significant differences to other tagging research which was primarily conducted using popular (non-scientific) tagging platforms like Flickr or Delicious. We observe a great overlap of tag material and document text and rather few non-content related tags. The comparison of user tags with author keywords shows that users tend to use less and more general tags. Finally, system functionality seems to play a role for users’ tagging behaviour."

Findings:

+ "The ”typical tag” is a single-word noun, taken from the title of the respective article (identical or variation), thus directly related to the respective subject."

+ "Compared to author keywords, social tags tend to introduce less and simpler concepts: Altogether, only one third of the social tags matched with (the far more numerous) authors’ keywords. Moreover, tags tend to be more general and users tag their articles more general and with less words than authors.ix"

+ ".. almost half of the tags (46%) are not found in the document text. This shows that users’ tags considerably add to the lexical space of the tagged resource."

Firefox 3 bookmarking tips

Five ways to master bookmarks in Firefox 3 By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (June 23)

Firefox 3 came with a new bookmarking system. (You mean - some people are still using browser bookmarks and not social bookmarks?)

"Yeah, there are still folders and bookmarklets, but joining the party are useful items like tags, smart backup, and a new way to track which sites you're actually visiting to help weed out what's unneeded."

Smart bookmarks and smart folders might be a reason to use this as well as social bookmarks.

The smart bookmark is a kind of saved search -- "These codes can range from simple queries to a string that will search a domain and give you the latest stories, or simply those related to a keyword." - but it's complicated.

The smart folder stores bookmarks and history for a keyword or domain depending on what you set up.

Can also access social bookmarking accounts to make it social.

Ad component to Stumbleupon

Don't search, Stumble by
MATT HARTLEY, Globe and Mail (May 22)

Stumbleupon is more like ""channel surfing than using a search engine". Use the subject groupings to discover sites with photos, articles, videos.

Marketers see the opportunities - "By incorporating elements of social media, it is offering advertisers a unique ability to market to users with particular tastes and interests, and the opportunity to glean instant feedback from their campaigns in a way that was not readily available before."

Some figure - "The site now boasts more than five-million registered users, who submit between 25,000 and 30,000 new pages to the database every day. More than 12-million “stumbles” are performed on a daily basis and the service is currently one of the top 10 installation add-ons for the FireFox browser."

del.icio.us add-in for IE

del.icio.us Extension For Internet Explorer Adds Firefox Features by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 13)

There's a new delicious extension for users of IE 6 and above for syncing bookmarks, searching, and adding.

More information and download link from the announcement in the delicious blog - Internet Explorer and del.icio.us

Study: Social Bookmarking and Web Search

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search? by Paul Heymann, Altsearchengines (May 1)

Paul Heymann presents the results of a study of social bookmarking done at Stanford University. The study analyzed results from delicious, Yahoo, and Open Project Directory.

I covered the formal paper in Major Study on Value of Social Bookmarking

Diigo for social research

Diigo : The End Of Bookmarks? by Phil Butler, Search Engine Journal (Mar 27)

Diigo - good for notes, bookmarks, sharing, adding sticky notes. Has the line - "you are what you annotate"

Phil Butler can't say enough good about it --

"With the release of Version 3, Diigo has fairly effectively expanded its reach into the social networking venue even farther. Aside from that, the inherent tools available on Diigo as a aggregationa and research platform have been expanded greatly also. So many startups have been either hyped or constructively accentuated that it is sometimes difficult to put an actual value on them, this is not the case for any of Diigo’s faithful users."

See demo at Diigo site.

delicious to change

Del.icio.us Drops the Dots as Site Gets Makeover Mashable (Mar 14)

Screenshot of a new del.icio.us that indicate a redesign as well as a new domain - delicious.com. But no word on when changes will go into effect.

Del.icio.us for education

Who says librarians (and teachers) don’t like tags delicious blog (Mar 12)

Delicious enthusiast, Britta Gustafson, lists several bookmarks to articles and examples of use of del.icio.us for educational purposes.

Major Study on Value of Social Bookmarking

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search? by Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-Molina, Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University, (Feb 2008)

Fascinating report on the value of social bookmarking for web search drawn from a study of del.icio.us and compared to search results from Yahoo. This is a conference paper that was presented in Feb 2008 to the First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'08)

Social search is often heralded as the next wave for improving search relevance. The authors give us a clear definition - "However, usually what is meant by social search is something like incorporating user-generated tags or ratings into an index or ranking function."

[Though social search is also ranking results based on votes or by clicks in a community. ]

Could using those tags and bookmarks improve results at search engines? Yes, maybe, and no.

Some interesting points and findings from their study of del.icio.us.

+ del.icio.us users tend to bookmark pages that have been recently updated or created - and tended to find these before Yahoo Search did, and certainly long before they were added to the Open Directory.

+ about 25% of pages posted to del.icio.us were new and indexed by Yahoo over the following 6 months. 17% new urls still hadn't been indexed after 6 months.

Result 1. "del.icio.us users post interesting pages that are actively updated or have been recently created. "

Result 2. "del.icio.us can serve as a (small) data source for new web pages and to help crawl ordering."

+ a social site can come to depend on a small number of users. (At Digg, top 100 users create 56% of the content). But this isn't the case at del.icio.us where 30,000 users contribute 50% of content. [Would be interesting to know this as percentage of users.]

+ people bookmark what they need. This could be the same url as others (happens 20% of the time) or new urls (30 to 40% are first posts). [Authors did not note that popularity is a form on endorsement that search engines might use.]

+ there's not much correlation between the popularity of a tag to the popularity of a search term. [Does this mean that searching on tags isn't notably productive?]

Result 6: del.icio.us may be able to help with queries where tags overlap with query terms, and there is a reasonably high overlap (if not correlation) between tags and query terms.

+ around 78% of the tags were relevant for the item, and just under 5% were subjective (eg funny, todo).

+ there are about 120,000 bookmarks added each day, but compared to the 1.5 million blog posts this is still small.

+ del.icio.us was estimated to have 30-50 million unique urls in June 2007. This is small in a web made up of billions of pages.

+ taggers tend to use a word from the title or page text as the tag. It may provide focus but it doesn't add to the search terms.

"Our broad conclusion is that a substantial proportion of tags are obvious in context, and many tagged pages would be discovered by a search engine. In terms of lessons for tagging systems in general, this may mean that while tagging for media sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube works well, tagging may be less informative for systems which already have full text"

+ a tag can apply to the domain as a whole, not just the page. Seemed to be true for 20% of entries. Authors drew this conclusion -- "user study suggest that a well financed search engine could pay "librarians" to tag entire domains rather than single URLs. Our broad conclusion was that paying such librarians would be more efficient, and might obviate the need for about 20% of the tags on URLs bookmarked." But that is exactly what a good subject directory is - web sites / domains categorized by what they are broadly about.

On the question, could using those tags and bookmarks improve results at search engines?

Yes -- users pick up pages earlier, and the tagging may reinforce the subject.
Maybe -- the tags don't add new information
No -- in spite of growth in bookmarking, the volumes are small.

[There are other difficulties in using this aspect of social search - fragmentation of collections - del.icio.us, magnolia, and other services; and risk of spam once bookmarks matter in results ranking.]

Ways to Get More from Tagging

5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read/Write Web (Dec 31 2007)

Presents five ways to exploit tagging. The first is just to periodically review what you've tagged - reinforce memory. There are good suggestions on how to share tags through a rss feed in a community or to a web page. Kirkpatrick, who used to use del.icio.us, has switched to Ma.gnolia for several reasons - active development team and new standards are two. Ma.gnolia will output an Attention Profile Markup Language (APML) file representing your interests that could be used as filter for finding "more like this".

The New Furl

Furl.net an early online bookmarking, page saving site, has finally updated its user interface and platform.

Furl Redesign Offers Improved Interface and Platform - Registered Users Reach 1.6M Business Wire (Feb 4)

Press release identified these changes:

Through its unique feature set Furl has quietly attracted a loyal following of users who will continue to benefit from key functionality offered by the new platform:

-- Cached-Copy Archiving - Users can save a complete cached copy of the page, preventing their bookmarks from suffering from 'link-rot'.

-- Smarter Search - Users have the option to search both their personal archive and community archives for relevant results.

-- Import / Export - Researchers have the flexibility of multiple bibliographic exporting formats (MLA, APA, etc.) making research collection easier.

-- Recommendations - Furl's algorithm recommends compelling content and other Furlers with similar interests.

The platform was rebuilt from the ground up using Ruby on Rails, a popular open-source web framework that allows the Furl team to rapidly develop new features.

Changes I noticed:

+ It's orange now.

+ There seem to be more controls for sorting one's collection, viewing by topic or time when it was bookmarked.

+ Press release says that now Furl will archive the page. It was supposed to do that in the past, but old pages I saved are gone - just the clipping, the url and the tagging remain.

+ Recommendations used to be the best feature, but at the moment the page is a bust.

+ There are more advertisements.

+ The display of information about a url may have been improved - shows who furled it, into what topics, and what else members furled. See this example of Skip the Tuition: 100 Free Podcasts from the best colleges in the world.

Wating for del.icio.us 2.0

Will We See Delicious 2.0 This Week? by Michael Arrington, TechCrunch (Jan 21)

There was some indication last summer there would be a new version of del.icio.us. Still no word except for this "peep".

del.icio.us results at Yahoo

Yahoo! Adds Del.icio.us in Search Results Search Engine Showdown (Jan 19)

Guess we should have expected this - "TechCrunch discovered that for some Yahoo! searches, they have added in links to (Yahoo!-owned) Del.icio.us bookmarks. ydel.pngYahoo! does not use the Del.icio.us name. Instead, the Del.icio.us logo is followed by number and "people bookmarked this page under" whatever tags they used."

Del.icio.us represents a popular / social vote - this is probably a good thing if users are able to interpret it correctly.

2Collab from Elsevier

Elsevier Announces Launch of 2collab, New Research 2.0 Platform (Nov 27)

Elsevier has the web 2.0 bug. It has launched a collaboration tool for researchers - 2collab.
"2collab is a free Web application that provides researchers with a platform to share resources with networks of peers and specialists, creating an online community that facilitates information discovery, evaluation and debate. "

Effectiveness of Folksonomies

Tagging and Searching: Search Retrieval Effectiveness of Folksonomies on the Web, by P. Jason Morrison (May 2007)

"A thesis submitted to the College of Communication and Information of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science"

Jason Morrison conducted this study as part of his Master's thesis. The study looked at the search effectiveness of services that employ tagging (folksonomies) and compared them to directories and search engines.

He constructed measures of precision, retrieval and recall to compare the effectiveness of the three types of search tools in retrieving information for five types of information queries: factual, known site or document, selection of documents, news, and entertainment.

The paper is interesting for showing the strengths of search engines and directories. Folksonomies do not come out well, being weak even in news and entertainment where we would expect better performance. They are also not good for factual answers or known site.

But this doesn't mean writing off folksonomies. A url that is found through a folksonomy and a search engine is likely to be of higher relevance (someone "voted" for it) suggesting that search engines would be stronger if they included the content of folksonomies.

One option would be to take folksonomies into account when ranking results (but spammers would have a heyday with that).

While folksonomies were found to have lower precision than the others, del.icio.us was as good as or better than Yahoo Directory and Open Directory Project for the first 20 results.

The study acknowledges that the search facilities at the folksonomy sites are weaker than that at directories or search engines, but doesn't recognize that each type requires different search techniques. It sounds as if most queries were straight keyword although there is some mention of using query operators. We have to use just one or two words at social bookmarking sites and directories, and do better with more words at search engines.

Morrison does note that folksonomies could be much more useful with better search systems. Absolutely.

The study, conducted in November 2006, examined 103 searches by 34 students in the Library and Information Science (SLIS) and Information Architecture Knowledge Management (IAKM) graduate programs at Kent State University.

"Folksonomy" services chosen were the social bookmarking sites - del.icio.us., furl, and the social news sites - reddit. Use of these was compared to the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project, and the search engines - MSN, Google, Altavista.

Some Findings:

+ URLs returned by more than one search engine are more likely to be relevant - this is in line with other studies done of web searching.

+ Overlap was low - nearly 90% of results were from only one "IR system". This is consistent with other studies.

+ Relevance was higher if a search result was returned by the three types of systems: folksonomies (social bookmarking), directories, and search engines.

Web pages that were returned by all three types were most likely to be relevant (42.31%), followed closely by those returned by directories and search engines (41.79%) and those returned by folksonomies and search engines (31.91%). The web pages returned just by search engines were actually more likely to be relevant than those returned by both directories and folksonomies (23.50% to 16.67%)

Although URLs that appeared in both directory and search engine results scored even better, the difference between that set and the folksonomy/search engine set was not statistically significant.

+ Precision: this is the number of relevant results divided by the total number of
results retrieved. Google did best in this study, and Reddit the worst.

Google had the highest precision, with about 28.6% of it's results judged to be relevant. Yahoo followed with a precision of 27.1%, then Alta Vista at 26.3%, and Live at 23.5%. Del.icio.us ranks next at 21.1%, followed by Open Directory at 17.2 percent. At the bottom of the list are Furl at 9.4% and Reddit at 4.1%.

+ Retrieval:

retrieval rate results are a little different than the precision results, with Live and AltaVista returning sites 98.5% of the time, followed closely by Google at 89.4%. Reddit and Furl come in next at 56.2% and 53.1% respectively, with Del.icio.us, Open Directory, and Yahoo grouped together at the bottom at 19.1%, 18.1%, and 17.1% respectively.

+ Comparing the three types:

The search engines, which build their collections automatically, have both the highest precision and retrieval rate. The traditional directories Yahoo and Open Directory, which have strict control over what is included in their collections, have the next highest precision (22.1 %) but the worst retrieval rate (just 17.6 %). Searches submitted to the folksonomies that allow open submission had the lowest precision (10.4 %) but more than twice the retrieval rate of the controlled directories (42.8 %).

+ Recall: In this study recall was calculated from the number of relevant items retrieved in the first 20 at an engine divided by all the relevant items retrieved
by all engines in a search. Search engines, of course, with their larger databases, did much better on this, and folksonomies did poorly.

+ Examined by information need category: short factual statement, specific document or web site, selection of documents pertaining to an interest, all documents on an interest.

Searches submitted to the search engines for factual queries had the highest precision (44.1%), and search engines also performed well for specific item queries (35.4% precision, 26.8% recall) and queries for a range of documents (43.5% precision, 9.6% recall). The directories and folksonomies performed worst in specific item searches in precision, and worst in factual answer searches in recall. The folksonomies performed best when executing queries that required a selection of relevant documents – in that case, the precision was 16%.

+ Folksonomies for news and entertainment information. The hypothesis was that social bookmarking sites would be better at this than directories or search engines. They were better than directories for news (which stands to reason since directories are intended for collecting resources on a topic) though not entertainment. Search engines outperformed in both areas.

Mixx - a new Digg?

Diggers leave digg for Mixx , Pandia (Nov 25)

Users can vote with their feet - or in this case, fingers. "Techcrunch reports that many contributors to the social web “submit-and-vote-for-articles” site digg are frustrated with the current culture and practices. Many of them are therefore looking for a new home on the Web."

People are moving to propeller, reddit, and, the new, Mixx to save articles and comment. Pandia, in its review, suggests that Mixx has the qualities to become the new Digg. One of the most popular stories at Mixx today is an Oct 25 entry - Why Digg Is Neither Relevant Nor Useful

Microsoft Listas for Keeping Track of Things

How to Organize the Web By Erica Naone, MIT Technology Review (Nov 2)

Microsoft proposes to solve information overload with lists - or rather Listas. Of course, it's another version of social networking. Gary Flake, at one time a Yahoo man and now the director of Live Labs, was the mind behind it.

"Listas is, put simply, about making lists. Users can make their own lists, by either typing in original content or taking clippings from Web pages, or they can read or edit public lists. The lists can include almost any type of content, including images and videos. They can be designated either public or private, and they can be tagged to make them easier to search."

Diigo Beta Version 3

Diigo adds social network features Rafe Needleman, Webware (Sept 24)

Social bookmarking service, Diigo , is moving into version 3.0. The metasearch of other bookmarking services is gone and it intends to become a more of a social centre for interests - while people clip, tag, and save.

del.icio.us in libraries

Briefs: Fast Delivers First Complete Platform For Next-Generation, Personalized Storefronts; More Tagging, Resource Shelf (Sept 18)

Refers to an article in the Library Journal - Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us . Gary Price's comments in this posting raises many good questions about use of del.icio.us by a library. He also links to other postings expressing concern about quality of tagging when done by the masses.

Postscript Oct 12: Added link to Library Journal article.

Google into Shared Stuff

Google adds new "shared stuff" service by Matthew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Sept 20)

Picked up from Google Blogoscoped that Google has a opened a new sharing service - Google Shared Stuff - "it is a fairly simple service that allows you to share links with your friends. You can create a rudimentary profilem, and you can see what links others have shared (and how many times) and that's about it."

You'll find it at http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/stuff

Sounds like a form of social bookmarking but it looks like a blog. See article at Google Operating System - Google Shared Stuff.

Is tagging sagging?

Is tagging good or bad? Should we spend time tagging bookmarks at del.icio.us, or our photos, or blog entries? Does it help anyone other than ourselves? Is this activity contributing to some collective intelligence?

Tagging is very idiosyncratic - up to the person who is using the item, there is no controlled vocabulary - not even controlled spelling, on the public web there will always be spam artists cashing in on popular tags. But tagging still represents the public voice, chaotic and undisciplined as that may be.

Tagging has been receiving some negative "press" in some blogs - legitimately so. But on the other hand, Stumbleupon has been a huge success and the presence of Stumbleupon tags in search engine results (for those who install the toolbar) is useful. Tagging is a piece of social search - users do have something to add.

Some postings:

To the trough of disillusionment we go!, Matt Mower, Curiouser and Curiouser! (Aug 23, 2007) - "the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003"

Tough Talk About Tagging, Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept 7) - interesting for the comments especially those of Gary Price.

Survey American Tagging, Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Jan 31, 2007) - refers to the study by Pew Internet and American Life Project on tagging and presents 10 points about the weaknesses of tagging.

Meta search for social bookmarks

Infopirate.org has a metasearch of social bookmarking services. It appears to include Stumbleupon, Digg, Netvouz, Blinklist, Blogmarks, reddit, clipmarks, listible, diigo. del.icio.us and other leading social bookmarks didn't come up. Metasearch engines often have a problem with accessing the favourites. Infopirate is a start but lacks the features to be a strong tool.

Upcoming changes to del.icio.us

Screenshots: The New Delicious by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Sep 6)

del.icio.us is working on new displays and functions. Danny Sullivan runs through some screenshots of what it will be like.

Tools for del.icio.us

del.icio.us toolbox - 180+ tools and resources for using del.icio.us, Mashable (Aug 31)

There are so many tools here it is hard to choose - something for the sidebar? visualization tool? verify and delete bookmarks? ways to import bookmarks? geotag bookmarks for maps? better search? There is so much here. del.icio.us users - pick one from this list and try it.

Mister Wong from Europe

In Europe people go to Mister Wong for their social bookmarking. It began in German and is also available in Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French - and now English for the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.

In addition to the capability of online bookmarks, Mister Wong supports sharing among a group of people who can also vote and with hand picked buddies.

There is a plugin for adding entries to a WordPress blog.

Mister Wong staff welcome you in this YouTube video.

Sproose does Video

Sproose , a search engine that ranks web results by user votes, has added voting for video to its search site. Blinkx supplies the videos and Sproose supplies the voting technology. This makes more sense to me than voting for particular web results. However, Sproose does have additional functionality as a social bookmarking tool: tagging, add comments, save bookmarks, follow up on what other people liked.

Video on Social Bookmarking

Great video on Social Bookmarking in Plain English by commoncraft (Aug 2007) - uses delicious as the example. Under 5 minutes.

See others done by commoncraft through the video tag.

Forbes for Clipmarks

Forbes buys social bookmarking site Clipmarks by Eric Eldon, VentureBeat (Aug 7)

Forbes Magazine found Clipmarks so useful for clipping and sharing web material that it bought it. A Forbes director commented on this posting and shed some light on intentions - the technology can help in providing the audience "more insight about business and investing in a lot less time" and they want "to ensure that this amazing functionality is available to our editors and readers".

Social Media Sites

Beginners Guide to Social Media from SiteMost (Jul 30)

Social Media - where many contribute to adding content - and has come to include "Social News, Social Bookmarking / Tagging, Professional Networking, Social Networks, Question / Answer Networks, Photo Sharing, and Video Sharing. "

CoReap for Social Bookmarking and Search

CoReap is a new social bookmarking tool that lets you bookmark from your browser and share with your "social search" friends immediately. Results from your social search network will show at the top of the page of Google results or Yahoo results. Bookmarks from other social bookmarking services are also picked up. Can import bookmarks from del.icio.us into your CoReap collection. Tags show in a tag cloud in the CoReap browser sidebar.

This is a browser add-on. According to information on the site, bookmarking works in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but you'll need Firefox for the social search extension.

Looks very manageable especially if you are about to set up a social group for sharing discoveries.

CiteULike for academics

Citeulike: A Researcher's Social Bookmarking Service, Ariadne (Apr 15, 2007)

Kevin Emamy and Richard Cameron describe a tool which assists researchers gather, collect and share papers. "This article describes Citeulike, a fusion of Web-based social bookmarking services and traditional bibliographic management tools. It discusses how Citeulike turns the linear 'gather, collect, share' process inherent in academic research into a circular 'gather, collect, share and network' process, enabling the sharing and discovery of academic literature and research papers."

Top Social Bookmarking Sites

The Big Boys of Social Bookmarking - The Top 24 Sites, Chris Winfield, 10e20 (May 15)

Presents an annotated list of the top 24 social bookmarking sites based on a list of 20 originally compiled by eBizMBA . I'm surprised Diigo is not on this list.

Diigo Research Tool

Diigo does a very good job of searching tags across several sources and presenting results, and can also serve as a collaborative research tool.

On a search for classification it picked up results from del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg - a mix of social bookmarks and blog postings. Google links comes into play when you inquire on a specific article - but the Google backwards link search is known for being incomplete and weak. This information is displayed on the About page for each result along with tags, bookmarking names, postings, and comments -- all in all a very informative page.

But Diigo is more than a metasearcher. It's a collaborative research tool. You can form groups here, and add your bookmarks to Diigo and other services you use. In addition you can clip pages and add stick-notes.

From the Diigo about page - " Diigo (dee'go) is about "Social Annotation". By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media."

CNet editors gave Diigo a 7.3 rating in CNET editors' review, Reviewed by: Elsa Wenzel (Sept 28, 2006)

"Diigo is an online bookmarking tool with a twist. Sometimes, merely saving a bunch of tagged Web sites to a list of favorites is not enough. Ever wanted to highlight one cool corner of a Web page? Do you wish you could scribble on various Web sites to collect recipes, plan a vacation, or write a big research paper, then share your notes? Diigo can help you do that."

del.icio.us Better

The Search Engine That's Already Better Than Google, SEOMoz.org (May 2)

Shows how useful del.icio.us can be for getting results.

StumbleThru Sites

Stumbleupon, a kind of social-bookmarking page-recommending system, has StumbleThru now for exploring content at popular sites.

"StumbleThru will be initially available for Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Blogspot, Wordpress, BBC, CNN, PBS, TheOnion, and Physorg, as well as all .edu and .gov websites. We plan to add more in the future, so please let us know if there is a particular domain you think we should add. " From the StumbleUpon Blog .

It's another application of serendipity at work, this time at a higher level. Good idea.

See StumbleUpon Releases StumbleThru For Domains, Chris Sherman, Searchengineland (Apr 20)

Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon drops audience rank feature, Pronet Advertising (Apr 17)

Stumbleupon removed two popularity ranking features, possibly to stop people from gaming the system. One was audience rank - number of people who stumbled upon a site. The other was popularity of a new submission.

I don't imagine this will hurt the service - the first page still shows "recently popular websites".

What might hurt Stumbleupon is the number of people who bookmark individual pages of current news rather than sites of interest. News stories would probably be better done at Digg or Newsvine.

Social Sites Stats

The 10 Largest Social Driven Sites, ProNet Advertising (Apr )

Some U.S. stats on monthly visitors based on Compete data obtained through eBizMBA:

Social Bookmarking
+ delicious 909,091
+ Stumpleupon 390,523
+ Furl 127,263

Social News
+ digg 12,156,271
+ Netscape 5,832,349

Prefound is Back

PreFound Relaunches, Tries To Rise Above Social Search Din, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Mar 21)

Prefound, a social bookmarking / search tool, has re-emerged with a new interface and possibly more community. I think the previous version was more like building mini-guides or directories on topics. This one hopes that people add to many groups including whatever they set up for themselves. Also you can personalize by outlining your interests. Wikipedia turns up too in the search results.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land wrote, "Social engines are seeking to bring people back into search, in one sense, to create more structure around results. And in many cases, assuming enough participation, engines such as PreFound are indeed going to be more efficient than using "traditional" Web search. But participation is the core challenge."

Getting that participation is key. But whose participation, with what interests, with what commitment? Are all the social bookmarking services competing for the same market? I bet they are. Is that market expanding? Probably but they might not be sharing, just using. Would niche social bookmarking communities be better? Thenacademics could be in their own world (according to the discipline), and students (according to their major) in another, and professionals in theirs (according to their profession). Maybe someone should create a social bookmarking world that supports specialized communities.

Stumbleupon vs everyone else

StumbleUpon Defined vs. Digg, Google, MySpace and More, Garett French, Search Engine Journal (Feb 15)

Compares Stumbleupon, the social bookmarking type of tool that thrives on serendipity, to the other tools - social and otherwise.

Social Browsing

"Life of the Party: Social Web Browsers" By Stephanie Taylor, Freepint (Feb 15)

"Social Web browsers are the latest buzzword application. Designed to support the Web 2.0 trend of online sharing, they make it easier to share resources. They address the two sides to sharing, whereas old- school browsers address only one. Social Web browsers let you share information with other people as well as let other people share with you."

Reviews two: Flock for saving and sharing and even blogging, and Stumbleupon for site discovery and building collections. These are quite different tools with "social" components and might be used together.

Stephanie Taylor concludes, "... the biggest thing that social Web browsing has to offer to information professionals at the moment -- an alternative, adventurous source of new material."

Delexa tagging

Delexa — a Del.icio.us / Alexa Mix, ResearchBuzz (Jan 31)

Delexa - attempt to help people search on tags (taken from Del.icio.us) to find the more visited sites (according to traffic recorded by Alexa). Main page lists the top 19 U.S. sites and their topic tags. To give credit these do describe these very popular "sites" reasonably well - Yahoo -- search, yahoo, email, portal, news. But, is this useful for searchers?

Tara Calishain reviews it and notes that Delexa is one of several tag-based tools "that are increasingly making searchable subject indexes irrelevant."

Stumble Upon Sites

Hit Stumble, have a nice trip by Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Jan 29)

Has the story of Stumbleupon, a social bookmarking service that began in Calgary and is now in Silicon Valley.

"StumbleUpon now has more than six million websites that have been voted upon by users, and has added features including the ability to "stumble" upon pictures and to stumble based on keywords. The latest addition was the ability to stumble upon videos, a la YouTube."

Save to Furl

Looksmart made some changes to FURL for creating or using topics when adding pages and bookmarks - see Save to Furl - Help. - Create topics (rather than folders) and add keywords (rather than tags).

Existing topics are listed horizontally rather than in a dropdown box. If Furl is looking to catch up to any of the other social bookmarking centers - del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, or even MyWeb 2.0 - this won't do it. They need to work on the My Archive and the search function.

Social Media for Search

2007 The year of search engines and social media, Pandia (Jan 7)

"We are certain that social media marketing — the use of Web 2.0 sites and services — will become an important part of search as well as search engine marketing in 2007."

Of interest: "Social media are also important for web search because some social media sites and tools, like bookmarking sites, swickies and Rollyo, create vertical, topic oriented selections of the web. These kinds of “web extracts” are becoming more and more important as the web grows bigger and more diverse."

Top Social Bookmarking Services

Top 5 social bookmarking services, Pandia (Nov 28)

Names Furl, Netvouz, del.icio.us, Mag.nolia, and Bluedot (for MySpace) as the 5 of 20 tools that meet Pandia's criteria for size of community, help pages, import / export, RSS feeds, and an information blog.

BlueOrganizer

BlueOrganizer 3.0: Instant Vertical Search and Tagging, TechCrunch (Nov 20)

"BlueOrganizer is a Firefox plug-in for social bookmarking/tagging that emphasizes use of standardized and automatically determined terms of categorization instead of only the terms that a user thinks of to categorize a web page. It’s a smart semantic based tool that syncs with Del.icio.us, offers dazzling contextual search and is already bringing in revenue."

Posting has some screenshots and some very interesting comments - mainly from people who express doubt about usefulness.

Wink.com Search

Wink, The Social Search Engine, Adds New Features, ResourceShelf (Nov 5) -- changes at Wink.com - graphics its uses, video it can save to collections, and bookmarks.

Primer on social bookmarking

Get Social With Your Bookmarks by Matthew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Nov 10) -- mainly about del.icio.us and Furl. That this article is in the Globe and Mail indicates that social bookmarking is about to break into mainstream.

"A social bookmarking site is a place that makes it easy for you to store your bookmarks, and to "tag" pages with keywords to make them easier to sort and find again -- but it also makes it easy to share your bookmarks with others, and to share their bookmarks in turn. In that sense, such sites are very much "social media" in the same way that news-recommendation sites like Digg and Reddit are. Searching a particular keyword brings up your tagged pages, but also any similar pages that others have saved that happen to use the same tags."

Social Bookmarking Roundup

Social Bookmarking Showdown by Scott Gilbertson, Wired (Nov 6)

Good article that reviews "the best places to store and share your bookmarks while searching and discovering new sites from other users." Ratings are out of 10. Covers del.icio.us (6), Wink (5), Furl (7), Stumbleupon (6), Blink List (may become popular with MySpace users) (7), Ma.gnolia (8).

Also refers to postings about social bookmarking in the blog Monkey Bites under Communities .

Stumbleupon Serendipity

The Serendipity Of StumbleUpon - an interview with Garrett Camp, Chief Architect at Read / Write Web (Oct 17)

Stumbleupon, a social bookmarking tool, has 1.5 million users - more than del.icio.us has.

"In this post, Garrett [Garrett Camp, co-founder and chief architect] describes StumbleUpon as a "personalized content discovery" service and outlines how it has grown to the million plus users it has today. Interestingly, he says that nearly half their user base is outside the US and more than a third are over the age of 35!"

The Stumbleupon group had to move out of their "bedrooms in Canada" (city not mentioned) to San Francisco in January 2006 to pitch to investors and get the service launched.

Interesting that Garrett Camp talks about "personalized content discovery". There is something about Stumbleupon that makes bookmarking seem a little easier, a little more fun, and a little more meaningful. Save the big ones here, and contribute reviews.

Yahoo Bookmarks Beta

Yahoo Updates Toolbar and Bookmarks by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 25)

Yahoo has introduced a new toolbar that includes a bookmark function. It sounds wonderful - save a thumbnail, optionally save the page, create folders, add tags, add notes, search the collection - but this is a private tool and while one can email bookmarks, there aren't the sharing options of the other two bookmark managers that Yahoo owns, del.icio.us and MyWeb2.0

The toolbar is available at toolbar.yahoo.com. The toolbar has a button for Yahoo! Bookmarks Beta by which you can save, search, and browse your bookmarks.

Yahoo Gears Toolbar, Bookmarks For Social Search, By Nicholas Carlson, Internet News.com

Here it is revealed that social search style of del.icio.us is the ultimate goal, but that mainstream users (20 million users have the Yahoo toolbar) are slow to switch and need to understand tagging first.

Good definition of social search: "Social search is search that asks people, not automated computers, to index the Internet."

Yahoo makes Internet bookmarks ready to share by Eric Auchard, Reuters via Yahoo News (Oct 25)

Refers to the toolbar and to Yahoo Bookmarks.

"The new version of Yahoo Bookmarks at http://new.bookmarks.yahoo.com, offers several improvements on organizing bookmarks into folders to make them easier to find. But it also encourages users to try "tagging," a more modern way of organizing information that relies on users assigning keywords to personally important information to make it easier to search for and find such information again later."

Of interest: "The new bookmark and toolbar products are available in the United States, Germany and Taiwan, with other countries to follow." However, I can access the toolbar with my Canadian Yahoo identity.

What I've noticed:

+ MyWeb2.0 users will see all their bookmarks in the My Bookmarks application as uncategorized (because Yahoo dropped folders when it introduced MyWeb2.0). Tags are there but no tag cloud, an essential navigational device now.

+ The thumbnails of the pages are lovely.

+ There is a tab for Recommended. These match what Yahoo shows as Interesting Today in MyWeb2.0

+ There is a help page - http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/bkmks/index.html

I like the new Bookmarks tool but I like MyWeb2.0 more. Will be glad when the two are merged.

del.icio.us network

del.icio.us Plans To Become A Social Network, Read/Write Web (OCt 4)

Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, indicated in this interview that he'd like to move del.icio.us into a social network where people connect with each other. Read/Write commented, "I think what Joshua is talking about is expanding this into a more full-featured social networking system - with commenting, groups, etc. Perhaps similar to Imeem, which combines content browsing with social networking."

Also see - Comparing del.icio.us to StumbleUpon and also The Social Bookmarking Faceoff

"The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players - del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Will they catch up? In this post we attempt to answer that question."

BTW - social bookmarking didn't start with del.icio.us but it did take off as part of the Web 2.0 scene. There were other online bookmarking services like Backflip that let you share bookmarks with others.

StumbleUpon in Google and Yaho

StumbleUpon Integrates with Search Engines, Google Operating System (Sep 29)

StumbleUpon, a kind of social bookmarking recommender system, now taps into search results in Google and Yahoo, marking results that have been bookmarked in Stumbleupon and showing a user-applied tag. The tag isn't always what you would expect and may seem completely inappropriate. but, as long as you know, it can give a quick idea of what the site is about.

"StumbleUpon, the service that lets you find and recommend interesting sites, works mostly by using a plugin for your browser (Internet Explorer and Firefox). StumbleUpon updated their plugin, by integrating their metadata into search results from Google and Yahoo."

Book Lovers Social Network

Love books and reading? LibraryThing helps you catalog the books you have and those you are reading and meet others having similar interests. LibraryThing also searches Amazon, the Library of Congress and 45 other world libraries. And of course people get to tag the books with the terms most meaningful for them.

Wink Collections

Search Briefs: Social Search Engine Wink Launches Version 2.0, ResourceShelf (Sep 7)

Wink does more than just search on tags. It encourages people to build collections and share them

"Wink Collections are a cool way for you to gather and share the best links on any topic. A collection can be about anything - hilarious videos, your favorite band, the best restaurants in your area, or research on a new gadget - you name it. You create a collection and add links to it and it shows up in search results. Others can add links to the Collection - a great way for people to share what they know and improve search."

del.icio.us and digg

Del.icio.us reports 1 million users - post Yahoo! growth tops all of Digg, TechCrunch (Sep 25)

del.icio.us has 1 million registered users; Digg.com, 1/2 million; Flickr, 2.5 million.

Says Marchall Kirkpatrick - "This tells me that there is plenty of room for more services to provide these types of services, despite the exhaustion some of us feel every time a new one emerges. It also indicates that there is something far more interesting about Digg than the size of its contributing users."

Bookmarks for Traffic

3 Reasons Why Delicious Bookmarks Beat Digg Traffic Hands Down by Brian Clark, Performancing (Sep 22)

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking centre (also called a link aggregator), and Digg.com is a user community for current hot news. Clark, in this piece written for people looking for more links to their sites, has three reasons for prefering del.icio.us bookarks: they are enduring, they show commitment, and each bookmark is a targeted link. Someone commenting, added that bloggers can add a feed of sites they have bookmarked at del.icio.us.

Windows Live Favorites

Windows Live Favorites - review in CNet by Elsa Wenzel (Sept 22)

Windows Live Favorites is an online bookmarking service for saving and organizing sites with relative ease. It connects with Windows Live Spaces for networking and blogging, and with Messenger, but it doesn't support sharing outside of the Live community.

"Windows Live Favorites makes it easier to peruse your saved URLs than does Del.icio.us, although it's less elegant for sharing content collections with other people. Overall, we find Favorites helpful for organizing bookmarks for personal convenience, and the integration with other Windows Live services is a bonus if you already use Spaces and Messenger."

This works with Firefox and Netscape. Importing bookmarks is easy, and display is excellent. Live supports both folders and tags, better than del.icio.us or Yahoo. However, the nuisance factor with any bookmarking service is weeding out the old, useless, and dead.

Tag Search

Another Tag Search Engine, ResearchBuzz (Sep 4) - "Tagvy, at http://www.tagvy.com , metasearches a few different tag resources." - but only a few.

Tagging as taxonomy

Taxonomy for Fun and (Google's) Profit? Community Image Tagging, Traffick.com (Sep 4)

Does tagging work? Andrew Goodman thinks the tagging done at Flickr and YouTube for images and videos has worked out well, but there is some indication of problems with malicious tagging at Google Video and the same may happen with images. Does tagging need professional editors, he asks. Will a community system work, can there be effective incentive systems? He seems to answer yes. Information professional agree that keyword terms are good but that they should be drawn from a controlled vocabulary, and be applied with some analytical rigour rather than whim.

Back to Goodman: "Either way, tagging is moving search forward. Probably the most intriguing nascent tagging experiment, for me, is Amazon's. Books are being tagged as we speak, first by authors, then by prolific reviewers... and... later, everyone else? Or not? Regardless, the result seems to be a parallel form of taxonomy that arises spontaneously out of community effort (assuming reasonable expertise in the community), as opposed to getting the Library of Congress category right, or some other method that might have existed in the past. From a tag, bringing up all known books about "beanstalks" *tagged as such* is only a click away. That's not the same as doing a raw keyword search for beanstalks. Tagging is shades of past information science efforts, obviously, but it's happening here and now in a specific kind of way, and it would be a mistake to dismiss its impact."

Tagging at Amazon

Amazon Launches User-Generated 'Search Suggestions' By Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes.com (August 07, 2006)

"Amazon.com is allowing users to submit search suggestions for products listed on the site. This allows Amazon's search engine to find items for sale relevant to terms entered by shoppers when those terms don't appear in the product details."

New at Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us Adds A Couple New Features ResearchBuzz (Aug 8) - new feature for networks and active users of a tag.

Professional aggregators/bookmarkers

Is Social Bookmarking Worth Paying for? Amy Gahran, Poynter Online (Jul 25) Netscape morphed into a news site a la Digg in June where readers weigh in. Jason Calcanis, the new head of Netscape, is offering lead users of major social news / bookmarking sites money to post to Netscape.

So here's the question -- "In short, is it worth it to pay smart, dedicated people to provide a steady stream of entries into a social bookmarking services or similar tool? I think so. In fact, I think as media continues to evolve to become more participatory, collaborative, and conversational, this kind of filtering role will become an essential part of how many organizations -- not just news organizations -- function."

More on the Digg vs Netscape conflict over paying contributors at Netscape in this blog posting by Matthew Ingram at the Globe and Mail -- It's Digg vs Netscape.

Diigo for Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff

Diigo Offers "Social Annotation" Tool Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jul 26)

"Diigo ... combines a number of really useful tools and tasks into a simple but powerful interface. It's also a pure-bred web 2.0 service, offering easily customization (via Ajax) to more fully suit your own individual needs."

A Look at PreFound

Prefound: Another Social Bookmarking and Sharing Site by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Jul 10) -- Examines PreFound, a social search centre where people share their collections. As Price commented - students and teachers could use this for "dynamic webliographies". ResourceShelf itself uses PreFound as a place to keep its list of RealTime Databases .

User-Generated Brochures

Google, the Web, and the wikis:
Commentary: Creating user-generated brochures by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (June 6)

Interesting point of view - Google, Yahoo and others are making it possible for everyman to participate in building knowledge. This, as Francisco, is how the Oxford English Dictionary was created in the 1800s, but she doesn't mention that the OED had the leadership of a supreme editor, James Murray and next Henry Bradley.

" From Google's Co-op to Yahoo's MyWeb to startup services from Squidoo, ShopWiki, WikiOutdoors and others, the foundations are being laid for online guides that cover the most common interests and the most obscure ones.

In effect, Google, Yahoo and the others, are trying to fuse together the user-generated Wikipedia model, the expert-driven About.com model and the social-networking model of News Corp.'s MySpace.com.

Whether all of this turns out to be the next growth engine for online advertising remains to be seen, but the end results are beginning to remind me of that most prosaic advertising vehicle, the brochure."

Inside Google Co-Op

Pick of the Litter: Google Co-op by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (May 15) -- Barbara Quint says that although the product is being seen as "anemic" at the moment, it could signify a "a sea change in the importance and growth of such tools [social bookmarking and social search]".

"Describing the process involved in Google Co-op, Seth [ Shashi Seth, product manager for Google Co-op] stated: “Anyone can contribute. We expect it to work in a three-part process. At the first stage, the contributor will ask users to subscribe with specific pieces, relying on user trust and desire to utilize their content. At the initial stage contributors will ‘sell’ the Co-op product on their own sites and bring their own audience. Then we will tally how often they are used and the level of interaction and whether to build a signal. As confidence increases, the contributor has a better chance of getting into the [Google Co-op] directory. Once they are in the directory, it will make it easier for others to subscribe. And finally, with more quality proven, the information may affect Google Search itself.”"

Google Goes Social

Google going vertical -- Commentary: Using communities to enhance search results by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (May 10)

Google goes social. At its annual press meeting Google announced it " is harnessing communities with Google Co-op , a concept that lets users contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve search results for everyone. Google also announced, on Wednesday, Google Desktop 4 and Google Notebook, which allows people to share their notes about their searches."

How will it work? "First, if you want to participate, go to Google.com/coop. Sign in and create a profile and a label. For instance, if I want to make a page about travel in Napa, I might label it "Travel in Napa." Then, I could put all sorts of information in that page. (For anyone who read my column about PreFound, the idea is the same. PreFound allows people to be Featured Finders to create pages about topics. In this way, anyone who wants information about that particular topic can leverage the work of that particular Featured Finder.) In many ways, Google's Co-op is the same thing."

The Web will be abuzz with this.

Pandia Search -- Google launches Google Co-op -- Google to harvest the collective wisdom and competences of experts.

ZDnet Blog -- Google Press Day 2006 highlights

VNUnet -- New Google products emphasise search core -- Returning to its search roots

USA Today -- Google jazzes up search capabilities -- describes the 4 new tools briefly.

•Google Co-op. Users can sign up at www.google.com/coop/directory to subscribe to free health information from several organizations, including the federal Centers for Disease Control, the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente. Their tips on the best health data will show up in search results. Google Co-op also offers city guide information for more than 300 cities, including London and New York. Co-op is designed to let organizations label Web pages relevant to their areas of expertise. "We're going to take the Tom Sawyer view and see how our users paint the fence," said Google Vice President Marissa Mayer.

•Desktop 4. An extension of Google's tool to search for items on your computer now comes with more than 100 "Gadgets" — little widgets that do things such as list friends' birthdays, show videos and play music.

•Google Trends. Lets users examine searches for market trends. For example, a search for "surfers" will show that most searches come from Hawaii and Australia and link to news stories about surfing.

"For the first time ever, Google is making it possible to sift through billions of search queries from around the world to see what people are thinking about," said Mayer. Trends is targeted primarily toward marketers.

•Google Notebook. Available next week, it lets people save a portion of a website to a box that can be shared with others. Google showed an example of shopping for shoes, saving a certain pair and writing a note about it, then sending it to friends. The tool works in conjunction with Desktop 4.

Lots to try, absorb, and assess.

Collaborative Tagging

Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-text Tagging, by Emma Tonkin, Ariadne (April 2006)

"Today's 'hot topic' is collaborative tagging; the classification of items using free-text tags, unconstrained and arbitrary values. Tagging services are separated into two general classifications: 'broad', meaning that many different users can tag a single resource, or 'narrow', meaning that a resource is tagged by only one or a few users [2]. For a full introduction to folksonomic tagging, read Hammond et al [3].

There are now a large number of tagging services, many general-purpose, attracting a large and diverse audience. Some are intended for specialised purposes, targeted to a smaller, well-defined audience. Resources may be pointed to by any number of different databases, each of which is aimed at a different set of communities on the Web. The result is a large network of metadata records, containing a tuple of free-text descriptions and a pointer to a resource. The sum of the records from the various tagging services creates a sort of 'tag ensemble' - the sum of taggers' contributions regarding a certain resource. "

Digg Technology News

Social bookmarking: vote early, vote often By Rafe Needleman, CNet Review (Apr 17)

Digg.com represents the latest development in social bookmarking. Here subscribers submit news stories, mainly about technology, and others vote on it. You can add a Digg feed to a web page, and, of course, blog the stories found there. According to the CNet article, publishers are keeping an eye on which articles are seen as the most popular.

"The new thing in feedback, at least for tech sites, is to flag a story on Digg.com. If you don't know it, Digg is a fantastic site that collects pointers to Web links (stories, blog entries, and so on) from its users. Links that are popular bubble up to the top of the list. Users of Digg then see these links, and if they also like them, they click a little Digg It button to add another vote. It appears under a square box--called a chiclet by some (like me)--that lists the number of votes the link got. "

Yahoo MyWeb Is Better

Yahoo Enhances My Web with "People Centric" Tools, SEW Blog (Apr 5) -- It will be much easier to share pages and bookmarks in Yahoo MyWeb with others. Yahoo is dropping the requirement that everyone sign up for Yahoo 360 first.

Social Bibliography

Connotea does for the research bibliography what del.icio.us does for bookmarks. The website is to help researchers and clinicians manage and share information such as books, articles, web sites, blog entries. The front page has a tag cloud to show what the Connotea users are currently reading about. Bioinformatics is bigger and redder than the other.

This service was mentioned by Karen Loasby as a favourite tipple in Freepint (March 30)

Ma.gnolia for social bookmarking

Ahhhh, Ma.gnolias.... New Tag Site, Researchbuzz (Mar 9) - Ma.gnolia is a new social bookmarking site. It's not clear why we need another one since ther is already Furl, and My Yahoo and del.icio.us etc etc. But Tara Calishain has noted some useful extras -- "the extra search options, the ability to have both light and
regular RSS feeds for its tag search results, and the many groups already available."

You can get a good sense of the tagged collection of the Ma.gnolia community from the tag cloud page. If you are just visiting, browsing from that page will get you started. However, Ma.gnolia does not consolidate; there is substantial duplication because everyone's bookmarks with a particular tag are listed. Tagging also means variations in terms through spelling, capitalization, and spacing: web2.0, web 2.0, Web 2.0

Tag Search with Keotag

Keotag -- Meta Tag Search With Preview, Researchbuzz. Tara Calishain, as a great fan of tagging, likes Keotag , an all-in-one search tool for getting results according to the tags. Keotag will search Technorati, Blinklist, del.icio.us and 14 other sources according to the icon you click on. Simple one-word searches are best. On the whole, as Calashain says, "This is a good idea that's well-implemented", but she also noted that some resources were missing.

Social Bookmarking Prevails

LookSmart's Zeal Directory To Close, SEW blog (Mar 22) - Looksmart is closing the volunteer-run Zeal Directory in favour of promoting Furl.net, Looksmart's social bookmarking centre. This is very much in keeping with the time where individuals do their own 'categorizing' and share with others, rather than having subject experts select and describe.

Tagging as Social Trend

Tagging - the latest way to search the web by Jeff Jarvis, Guardian Unlimited (Jan 2) - names tagging as an important new trend.

"But tags are proving to be more powerful than that. Tags are a means not only to remember links, but also to discover content tagged by others, to target searches and advertising, to connect people of common interests, and even to collect the wisdom of the crowds."

Mentions that David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, is writing a book about tagging - Everything is Miscellaneous -

Internet Archive Bookmarks

View the bookmarks other people have made for the Internet Archives' music, movie and book collections.

Yahoo's My Web 2.0 Adds Features

Yahoo improves My Web 2.0 Pandia (Feb 11) -- Yahoo has improved MyWeb2 so that users can search everyone's tags (as can be done with del.icio.us), and people add a My Web 2.0 feed to their site.

More information in the Yahoo Blog - My Web 2.0 Update

Tag Clouds

In search of the perfect Tag Cloud, WordWorks (Jan 2, 2006) - examines the visualization of tags being done with tag clouds at several services such as Technorati, del.icio.us, flickr, and others. Finds "pitfalls of using tagsclouds from a usability perspective".

Wink for searching the tagosphere

You don't have to belong to a social bookmarking service to benefit from the bookmarks and tagging that other people do. Wink searches the Tagosphere -- Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Slashdot, or Yahoo! MyWeb and others. At Wink you can also create search sets and share them.

Social Search Tools

Never Search Alone by Rick Broda, PC Magazine (Oct 21, 2005) - looks at some "community" search engines for sharing bookmarks and content.

- Clipmarks - for capturing snippets. There is a plug-in for IE and now Firefox.
- del.icio.us - bookmarks - but notes that the site is confusing.
- Jeteye - part community, part blog, part wiki - a place where you can store notes in jetpaks. Jeteye calls itself an "online scrapbook".
- Shadows - for bookmarks, and considered more attractive than del.icio.us. Has blogs and groups.
- Yahoo My Web 2.0 - "a more fully realized social bookmark engine than either del.icio.us or Shadows".

Folksonomies

The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging by Ellyssa Kroski, Infotangle (Dec 7. 2005) - thoughtful review of strengths and weaknesses of folksonomies. Finds that folksonomies - user created tagging - will succeed where more formal taxonomies will not - "The fact of the matter is that the enormity of information that is now being published online through new mediums such as blog, wikis, etc., make a traditional taxonomy and controlled vocabulary an impossible solution."

Views on del.icio.us

Del.icio.us Users Debate Yahoo's Buy - Some fans of social networking site express concern about the new boss. - ByJuan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, PC World (Dec 14) - <b>Del.icio.us has over 200,000 users. This article is a report on e-mail interviews with three users - revealing for how they use the service. Tony Padilla wrote, "I've honestly found them [del.icio.us] more useful than Google for finding information. .."

Using bookmarks more

Sampling and Remixing: Life Beyond Surf-and-Search BY Mark Kingdon, CLickz (Dec 6) - finds he is bookmarking more sites and searching that collection. Most particularly - "More than ever, we're sharing our experience with others -- on our blogs, through shared links, via e-mail. Sure, search is huge. But we are going back to the future: to communities, to sharing, to the very behavior that helped make the Internet what it is today."

Tagging at Amazon

Amazon Starts Offering Tags to Some, ResearchBuzz (Nov 18) - Amazon account holders can tag books, and use tags done by others to get recommendations. Tara Calishain has some screen shots of what to expect and how to do it.

Downside of social bookmarking

Socially Acceptable Behavior ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 9 - November 2005 by Charlene O'Hanlon, ACM Queue -- As social bookmarking becomes more widely adopted on the public Web will it become polluted with junk? Will it be the target of advertisers, as this article predicts?

IBM Adopts Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is picking up steam fast. More articles are appearing about how to use this INSIDE an enterprise. ACM Queue has a 5-part article on Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

[ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 9 - November 2005 by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, IBM ]

Delicious and MyWeb2.0 are the two main examples today. These might be used internally. However, IBM developed its own called DogEar.

Good article for its description of social bookmarking systems and the potential for enhancing search within an organization.

Of interest: "Although we have just begun to get feedback on the dogear social bookmarking service, it shows great potential. A significant group of very active early users have already begun to generate excitement about the application through informal communication mechanisms. Indeed, there are already more than 100 mentions of the dogear application in the enterprise blogs. We have already seen a handful of dogear extensions by other members of the organization, which will only serve to increase the benefits of the application. We are excited by the potential for using the dogear application to improve information sharing, expertise location, and support of communities of interest within the enterprise."

Yahoo and Social Media

The Flickrization of Yahoo "How the founders of a hot young photo-sharing site are helping to change the focus of the search engine giant -- and turning its fight with Google into a battle of man vs. machine."
By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0, December 2005 Issue

Yahoo, since it acquired Flickr, has been expanding its "social media" - travel, shopping, MyWeb2.0 for personal search - getting reviews, involving people, adding members. It's all in the expectation that this will give Yahoo the edge over Google. For web searching, success will depend on whether "social search", ie following what others have found before you, will prove to be the faster and better.

Tagging

Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Nov 2) Sherman admits that he is not a fan of tagging, the practice of individuals adding index terms to pages or bookmarks they save, in the new social-bookmark centres. But he does see it being useful when used for a more restricted subject area like games, specifically Millions of Games.

"The site uses controlled vocabulary (called "Gameology") to describe categories (arcade, shooter, puzzle, etc). Although you can also add your own free-form tags, these category tags are well known to most users, so there's little ambiguity about what the tags mean."

Social Bookmarking

Share and Play Tag on the New Web Playground PC Magazine (Oct 21) - reviews community bookmark sites some of which support saving pages:

+ Clipmarks - good but won't work with Firefox
+ del.icio.us - well established but said to be confusing. Receives the lowest rating.
+ Jeteye (beta) - mix of blog, wiki, community.
+ Shadows (beta) - needs setup software.
+ Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (beta) -finds it the best for social-bookmarking.

But where's Furl.net? It has saved pages, recommendations, alerts, searching.

Read the one page version.

Social Bookmarking

On the Spate of Social Bookmarking Sites Traffick.com (Oct 28) - Shadows is another new social bookmarking service. Are are these "startups looking for a solution" as Cory Kleinschmidt says? I'm with Cory and add my two bits to ask how many of these can a person belong to? Once you get set up in one, why would you join and maintain another? Cory says the answer lies in a social bookmarking service connected to a browser and sees promise in Flock, a new browser. But, I'm not so sure - I'd like a service that integrates easily with several browsers.