Jots Review
by Paul Flyer
As social bookmarking takes off, there will be more and more sites that offer the service. The same phenomenon that has occurred with RSS Readers will play out with social bookmarking sites. The key question will be whether these new sites can offer a feature rich service that surpasses that of the original players.
is a collaborative bookmarking system that allows you to Store, Share and Discover relevant links. Store your own links and choose whether to share them with the world, with a select group of people or just for yourself to use. Discover new links based on specific users or topics of interest.
Jots has all the basics: a bookmarklet and a form for entering bookmarks. In addtion, it offers the ability to make a bookmark private or to make it accesible to certain other Jots users via the Groups functionality. This is an advantage over del.icio.us where everything posted becomes public.
One major feature lacking from Jots is the ablity to organize bookmarks. Jots allows users to tag a bookmark, but this tag is used only to collect data for the larger Jots community. The user cannot use the tag to organize their own bookmarks. There is not even any ability to organize by folders. This is surprising. One way any bookmarking site can provide a better user experience is by offering essential organizational functionality. UPDATE: I was too quick in my review. Tom from Jots posted a comment and steered me in the right direction. A users tags are listed underneath the calendar on the right. Organizing by tag is an excellent feature.
Jots does allows users to Post their list of bookmarks to their own website. This is accomplished using the API of Blogger, MetaWeblog or MovableType. This is limiting. It would be far better and more far reaching to provide Javascript, Atom or RSS feeds based on users bookmark lists. Any user, with any kind of website can place display a feed on their site. UPDATE: Each tag has its own RSS feed. The feed can be found at the very bottom of the list. If I were to make a suggestion it would be to move the feed icon next to the navigational bar. For example:
Jots>>username>>tag name (RSS icon here). This would make it more visible.
Jots will satisfy the user looking for a little more privacy control. With the tag and feed features, it should pull more traffic as users learn about it.
Be sure to review our list of recommended web tools.
In addition to providing a posting mechanism to your blog Jots does provide an RSS feed for virtually every view of the the site. You can subscribe to the main feed, a particular user’s feed, a specific tag or a tag from a specific user. At the bottom of each page is the classic little orange RSS sticker which contains a link to the feed, along with auto discovery references in the HTML source.
Although Jots doesn’t provide an “Explorer-ish” folder view of bookmarks, the tags act as a classification system. When you view your own bookmarks or those of other users you can use the tags to drill down to that unique view. This can be done across all users for a given tag or for a single user — The system is not constrained to a tag view across all users.
Thanks for taking the time to review Jots.com… it’s nice to know that someone is out there watching.:) And we’re always keen to hear ideas or suggestions for improving the site.
June 29th, 2005 at 12:27 amAnother site that you might find worth checking out is blinklist. It is spanking new but we hope you find it promising.
July 6th, 2005 at 1:09 pmI love JOTS! I switched from del.icio.us ages ago - at first because the site was more visually appealing, but now I’m just smitten and it would take a lot to get me to change. The tags are fine for me… I just have to put a lot of tags on things because I always forget how I tagged something, but that’s my problem. ;0
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:02 pm