Recommended Web Tools Archives

Diigo Review: Robust Social Bookmarking

Every now and then I get to write about something that takes a good idea and makes it better. When I first read TechCrunch’s review of Diigo back in March of 2006, I yawned, despite the reviewers enthusiasm. I had looked at many of the social bookmarking sites and saw nothing innovative. My own lack of enthusiasm for social bookmarking sites clouded my judgement when I read that review.

Today, I am a big fan of Diigo.

If del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site and Digg is the most popular social news site, then Diigo should become the internet researchers tool of choice. Beyond basic bookmarking, tagging and sharing, Diigo offers a suite of tools that turn it into a robust research, annotation and note taking tool.

Diigo defines itself as Social Annotation:

the best way to collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere

Diigo provides a basic toolbar from which all features are accessed.

Clicking on the Diigo button immediately opens up a bookmarking window. Having such quick access is very handy. The bookmarking window offers all the basics: url, title, Tags, Public/Private (public means your bookmark is visible by others), Unread (bookmark something and come back later to read more), Add elsewhere (Diigo allows integration with other bookmarking services). Additionally, Diigo displays existing comments, and lets you add your own comments.

The bookmarking service integration can be improved. Diigo doesn’t automatically login to the service. A popup login screen is provided for each service selected. This is laborious. There needs to be automatic integration so it seems seamless. Current integration is available with del.icio.us, blinklist, rawsugar, netvouz, shadows, furl, simply, spurl and yahoo.

The comments is where Diigo begins to diverge from other services. Comments are public and visible by all Diigo users. The purpose of comments is to leave short thoughts about a site that will provide useful to other users. Comments are view when using Diigo to bookmark a page. A commenter on the Yahoo page
wisely noted:

Diigo really needs a function to thumb up/thumb down the comments for pages. This will get spammy, really, really quick.

This is true and needs to be addressed by Diigo.

When I go to bookmark a page, I can also highlight text and Diigo will save it. So in the process of research, if there is a key paragraph about the topic I am researching, I can highlight the paragraph and then bookmark the page. As long as I am logged in to Diigo, every time I visit that page, that paragraph will be highlighted. Diigo gives options on the various kind of highlighting available.

On my Diigo homepage, both comments and highlights are posted underneath each bookmarked site for easy reference.

All tags are shown on my homepage as a tag cloud. I can switch this to a list. Each mode can be viewed alphabetically or by frequency. The really cool thing about tags in Diigo is the ability to easily edit them. I can easily choose a tag and rename or even delete it. This task is made too difficult by other services.

My own bookmarks can be viewed either from the Diigo website or from the Diigo toolbar. The toolbar lets me filter my bookmarks by tag so I can easily find what I am looking for. I can also choose to filter bookmarks by the entire Diigo community.

Diigo also has a powerful forwarding feature. If you find a website that a friend would be interested in as well, it only takes two clicks to email the URL to them.

The power of Diigo comes in with its annotations features. I already mentioned highlighting above. Diigo lets users aggregate those highlights. For example, you’ve spent hours researching a topic and tagged each site with a particular tag. On the Diigo site, you can pull up all those tags and display ALL your highlighted text. This provides you an easy way to view your information. This is a great tool for writers. Saves times from cutting and pasting quotes or flipping back and forth between all the bookmarked pages to remember what was pertinent to you.

Diigo also offers Sticky Notes. Sticky Notes are different than comments. Comments are always public and can never be edited (but can be deleted.) Sticky Notes can be public or private, can be edited and can be deleted. Sticky Notes should be used for your own thoughts. They can be used to simply indicate something you need to write about in the future, or type at length a response to a webpage that you will later use in an article.

There is more to be said about Diigo. Another great thing about Diigo is a very user friendly help section. I printed the whole thing out. After the 30 mins or so it took me to read through the material I had a pretty good understanding of Diigo’s capabilities.

The hardwork put into Diigo is evident. It has become my bookmarking tool of choice.

[tags]diigo, bookmarking, annotation, research, tools[/tags]

The downside to Digg

Independently finding a website then finding a message like this:

Sorry folks, but the Official Seal Generator made it to the front page of digg.com, and the server is completely overwhelmed. It’ll be back soon.

Grrrr.

Social Bookmarking versus Social News

Is there a fundamental difference between sites like del.icio.us and digg?

They are often lumped together in the same category of social bookmarking. However, del.icio.us, spurl and their cousins are true social bookmarking services. Sites like Digg and Newsvine are more social news services.

Socialbookmarking provides benefits for the bookmarker and for the community of bookmarkers. When an item is bookmarked, I can tag and categorize it anyway I want. I can use my bookmarks for my own personal reference whether I care about the social aspect of it or not. The community gets to see my bookmarks, can find new and interesting sites/pages for themselves that they can then add to their bookmarks. The more an item is bookmarked the more “authority” it seems to carry.

Social News tends to focus namely on that: news. The news changes by the hour if not by the minute. Social News sites such as Digg tend to primarily serve the community with little emphasis on the actual digger. That to me is the largest difference. At least in social bookmarking I have a mechanism that can organize my information in a way that is meaningful to me.

I prefer getting my news either from the major news sites or from blogs. If I want to read up on what is going on with technology, I would rather pop over to a technology website like Wired, than visit Digg. Digg in some ways is no different than Wired. Both have a relatively small editorial and writing staff. When I read Wired, I get the perspective of a small group of people. When I read Digg I read the choices of a small group of people. In reality, Digg is not the social news of THE community but “a” community.

While “dugg” items tend to carry “authority” as in bookmarking services, these are truly news stories as opposed to sites I would want to visit again and often. Maybe it just me, but I simply bookmark items that 1) are a helpful resource 2) say something important I want to read again or 3) something I would want to recommend. Of the 15 items at the top of the Digg technology topic right, 13 are news items. In a week, most won’t matter. Whereas I find items that get bookmarked via del.icio.us and others tend to have a lasting permanence of importance.

For me, I don’t find Digg to be a tool that helps me keep my information organized. Nor do I find that it is worth my time to find out what is Hot this second. While I do visit del.icio.us to find out what people are bookmarking, more often than not I am using it to organize my links. Which, by the way, they could still go a long way in improving.

[tags]bookmarking, social+bookmarking, digg, newsvine[/tags]

Feedlounge Integrates with del.icio.us

I wrote about my desire to have some integration/combination of social bookmarking, feed reading and task management.

Tooling around Feedlounge I rediscovered the fact that it allows the tags on blog posts to be integrated into one’s de.icio.us account. A process they call TagThru. I’ve had this turned on but totally forgot all about it.

Ok so now, all that needs to happen is some sort of integration between Feedlounge and Tasks…

[tags]feedlounge, tasks[/tags]

FRSBIM – Feed Reading Social Bookmarking Information Management

There is an abundance of social bookmarking sites. I have my favorites. But I don’t have the time to check all of them out. So, here is my request list. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

While it is nice to tag and share and all that, I want to be able to track my own actions with each bookmark. In particular I want to be able to mark the following:

1. Write/Blog about it
2. Mark it as read or action taken

When I bookmark something, I want to be able to go back and and check little radio buttons for each of the tasks above. I bookmark some stuff I want to write about. It is irritating to bookmark it AND add it to my to do list. OR create a empty draft post with the link to it (this becomes overwhelmingly cluttered).

There is some stuff I bookmark that I want to read LATER. I often forget. Would be nice to login and see what has been read and what hasn’t. Bookmarking services shouldn’t equate a bookmark with having read it. Bookmarks are of course, just placemarkers.

I am finding social bookmarks to be an inefficient means to create task lists off of.

Wouldn’t it be great if my Feed Reader, Task Manager and Social Bookmarks all worked together?

So here’s an idea for someone, anyone. Name the service PlaceMarker. Create a Feed Reader, Task Manager and Social Bookmarker that works together. Posts I read in my feed reader can not only be flagged or tagged but ALSO added to my Task Manager for some action to be done later (either read it or blog about it). Likewise, items I bookmark would work the same.

It is time to start integrating some of these apps – FRSBIM (freeze-bim).

[tags]social+bookmarking,feed+reader,task+manager, tasks, bookmarks, rss, feeds,to+do[/tags]

Or maybe it is serving your readers…

A question was raised on SEOMoz about whether those little links at the bottom of blogs posts that allow readers to add the post to delicious or digg where actually pressuring readers to endorse the post.

It is afterall just a link. The only pressure I have ever felt to click on a link is when I’ve just read some compelling sales copy. I don’t see how an “add to delicious” link is considered
pressure.

With the rise in popularity of social bookmarking sites, it makes sense for bloggers to post such links. In my view, it is offering readers a service. While most social bookmarkers probably don’t need the reminder or the link, it is still a handy way to provide readers an easy way to “remember” a post.

[tags]social+bookmarking, delcious, digg, blogging[/tags]

Information Aggregation Overload Recovery

Tired of information?

It gets to be too much sometimes. How is it ever possible to keep on top of it all?

It is impossible to keep on top of it all. Adding hundreds of feeds to an RSS Reader or creating user accounts for each new burgeoning social bookmarking/news aggregation website soon makes life more complicated than it need be.

Don’t even try to keep on top of it all. Rather, simply read that which meets certain self-defined criteria.

Here are a few thoughts on sorting through the morass.

Computer Generated Information Aggretation

Google News is a prime example of computer generated information aggregation. Just sit back and let it display news of interest. Of course, this content can be massaged to a user’s liking. By personalizing Google News, users can enter keywords that Google News will search for and then return stories of interest for that topic. There are other similar sites, like Topix, Findory or even the new Memeorandum. Though the latter is not personalizable. The key to personalization is keeping the focus narrow. Widening the focus will open the floodgates of information again.

Community Generated Information Aggregation

Social bookmarking is a form of community generated information aggregation. It is a great way to see what people find interesting and a great way to learn about new things. However, there are now way too many social bookmarking sites available. Choose one and stick with it.

Sites like Digg are another form of community aggregation. Users can submit sites (sorta like social bookmarks, but not really) and other users ‘vote’ on each site bumping it up in the Digg listings.

Individual Generated Information Aggregation

RSS Readers allow individual readers to add numerous RSS feeds of interest. The problem however is when the number grows too large. The key to effective use of an RSS reader is two fold. One is self-editing. Play the role of newspaper editor and begin deleting feeds that are no longer of interest or newsworthy. It ok, you have my permission to hit the delete button. Second, and not all readers have this feature, is a ‘smart feed’ feature. While it is nice to have 100 feeds, it is would be nicer to set up keyword searches on those feeds. A separate feed is generated for that keyword search. Another way for RSS Readers to tackle this is having a better set of filters.

In order to put some sane controls on news intake, I recommend the following recipe for news/infomration gathering:

1 computer generated aggregation site – Keep it sane. Choose only up to 5 topics of interest.

1 community generated aggregation site – in particular, just one social bookmarking site.

1 RSS Reader with a self imposed limit on the number of feeds entered. It may be 25, 50 or 100. Set a number. Once that number is met, no feeds can be added until another one is deleted.

Social Bookmarking Survey

The good folks over at Blinklist want to know your opinion of social bookmarking tools. They have created a social bookmarking survey to elicit user comments. It is a simple survey that asks two questions:

1. What social bookmarking services do you use?
2. What’s the most important feature missing, that would make your Social Bookmarking Engine a lot more useful for you?

Of course the goal of the survey is to help them improve their Blinklist service. One thing that has impressed me about Blinklist has been their team’s dedication to improving their product. I wish them the best. Mosey on over to the survey site and take two minutes to respond.

Wists Review

Lists with a Lisp? No not really. Think Flickr, but instead of one’s own photographs, using any image from the web.

Wists is used for creating visual bookmarks. Wists works like most other social bookmarking systems. Add the Wist bookmarklet to the browser toolbar and bookmark away. When the bookmarklet is pressed, Wists gathers all the images it finds on the current webpage and asks which one is to be used as part of the bookmark. Pretty Cool. Once the image is selected, users can add a Title (one is added by default), tags, and description.

How can one use Wists?

• Create a list of anything that lends itself to being labeled with an image.
  • Books
  • CDs
  • DVDs
  • Websites
  • etc.

  These lists can then be intergrated into one’s own website to let readers know of valuable resources, etc.

• Create wishlists. Wists allows one to create a visual wishlist of any image on the Web. It will be interesting to see if people prefer this method over site specific wishlists. The potential problem with a Wist wishlist is that it is not integrated to any ecommerce engine.
• There are many other uses which Wists lists on their site. http://wists.com/

Problems

The home page is different whether one is logged in or logged out. I understand why they have a different screen, however, I believe they could do it differently. Instead, of two different screens, it would seem feasible to just add functionality to the screen when a user is logged on. For example, a menu of member options might appear in the left nav bar, etc.

Some links do not work. I know that Wists is in beta at this time. Still, broken links do not build user confidence.

I am trying to determine if Wists is simply a toy or a tool. Will it be played with for a while and then die off once the fad wanes? Or will it become a tool that adds value to websites? To become the latter, it needs to be as robust as Flickr.

Gataga Review

Well, umm. Errr.

Gataga was on my list of sites to review. However, it is no longer there. Gataga.com is redirected to their blogspot. The last post on July 12th (today) states:

Goodbye Earthlings,

We’ve been summoned back to our home planet.

Gataga was launched on June 6th, 2005. A little more than a month later it has crashed and burned. What happened? Judging by the posts on the blog I can only surmise that the creators were overburdened by the workload.

Anyway, Gataga WAS a nifty little social bookmarking search engine.

Anyone know what really happened?

Zniff Review

Zniff is billed as the “human search engine”. Essentially, Zniff is a search engine for the websites bookmarked via Spurl (I have reviewed Spurl elsewhere) . Websites that get bookmarked the most appear higher in the search results. The idea is that bookmarked sites are favored choices among actual users. Thus, a search of those results will produce a list of the most quality websites.

Results can be returned based on relevance or time. Searching by relevance produces results generally based on the number spurled. For example, I searched for “fishing”. The number one result is American Fly Fishing Trade Association (it had been spurled 4 times). Doing a relevance search for “dogs” providing an interesting list. A site spurled 18 times (and about all breeds of dogs) was listed second, while a site spurled once (and solely about schnauzers) was listed first. It seems the algorithm needs a little work.

Searching for “fishing” again, but by “time”, produced an article on psychics as the number one result. The top result will be the most recent one added. However, what does a psychic have to do with fishing? It could be that page got tagged that way. A weird result nonetheless.

For more complete results, Zniff can pull from the Yahoo search result set as well.

Remember, this is a limited audience of users. This search engine represents only Spurl users. Since Spurl does integrate with del.icio.us, I suspect that the full released version of Zniff may include results from that social bookmarking tool as well.

There is a Firefox Plugin for Zniff that includes it on the Firefox Search Engine drop down list.

Zniff is useful to see what others deem important. I did searches on “poverty”, “homeschool”, and “london”. All the top sites were generally useful. If anything, Zniff can be used in conjunction with traditional search engines to do research, especially if you want to know what websites other people have found to be helpful.

Blogmarks Review

BlogMarks is another in a long list of social bookmarking tools. I cannot add much to this review other than what that I have already written about social bookmarking elsewhere.

Blogmarks offers three features that would be of interest to social bookmarkers. The first is the ability to make some bookmarks private.

Second, Blogmarks does allow users to organize by tag. This is almost a requirement for social bookmarking.

Third, Blogmark bookmark lists can be easily integrated into a website via their BlogSync interface. However, providing simple RSS feeds would be more user friendly.

Jots Review

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.

Jots

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.

Spurl Review

Spurl like del.icio.us and Furl is an online social bookmarking service. A Spurl is a bookmark and stands for SPecial URL.

Spurl like the others has a most popular (Hot Spurls) and a most recent (Just In) category. Users can view their own spurls in Most Visited, Recently Visited, and Latest Spurls categories. Searching takes place via a keyword input box or simply by using one of the above predefined categories. The search function actually searches an engine called Zniffs (more on this later.)

Like the others, Spurl uses a bookmarklet for users to add bookmarks. The bookmarklet allows the user to input Title (added by default), Category (user-defined), Tags, Description, Snip, Private, etc.

What sets Spurl apart?

Organization

Spurls can be organized by category (folders) or by tags. This allows for multi-levels of organization. I can add the Spurl to one folder and then tag it multiple ways. For example, I spurl a favorite news site and put it in a folder named News. I can then tag it with terms like “politics”, or “Europe”, or “whatever fits this particular news site”. I can then find the Spurl not only under my News folder, but I can also find it under any number of tags. Spurl allows bookmarks to be added to multiple folders but that isn’t as effective as simply tagging the item with multiple tags. I recommend placing a Spurl in only one folder but tagging it multiple ways.

Del.icio.us integration

If a user also has a del.icio.us account, Spurl allows integration with del.icio.us. Anything spurled will also be added to the del.icio.us site as well. Once integration is set up, a user does have the choice to turn off the del.icio.us integration for any item to be spurled. The integration allows users the ability to use two sites for the interface of one.

Spurl Bar

The spurl bar is a left side navigation bar that is integrated into an IE or Firefox browser. It is like having a mini Spurl site right inside ones browser. Users can access the regular Spurl categories as well as their owns spurls. Their spurls can be view by both category and tag.

Feeds for Spurls

Each spurl category has an associated feed. By each category I mean, every category on the Spurl site (New, Hot, etc.), every general category (Latest, Recently Visited, etc.) within a users library, every category (folder) a user creates, and every tag that a user creates. The feeds come in three forms: javascript, atom or xml. There is a lot one could do with this amount of flexibility. Add the Latest spurls feed to a website to show users your latest spurls. Add a particular category to your site for your readers. Etc, etc.

Zniff

Zniff is the search engine associated with Spurl. It searches all the bookmarks that have been spurled. It is branded as “the human search engine.” It is the equivalent of searching the collective favorites of all Spurl users. Definitely can prove to be useful especially as it continues to grow.

Spurl has become my favorite social bookmarking service because of the five reasons above.

How could Spurl be improved? Actually, how can any social bookmarking service be improved? Combine it with an RSS Reader. All my feeds and all my bookmarks in one place. One service has already done that. That review is for another day.

Furl Review

Furl is an online social bookmarking site that is part of the Looksmart family of websites.

Furl employs a more user-friendly interface and attempts to add more features than del.icio.us.

Like any of the social bookmarking sites, Furls uses a bookmarklet to enable users to easily bookmark a page. When bookmarking a page, users can add the Title, URL, Rating, Topic, Keywords, Comments and Clip. Keywords function as “tags”. I don’t know why they did not choose to use the term “tags” since that is the term generally used.

Furl has predetermined topics to which bookmarks can be added. These topics are in addition to any keyword that a user may assign. Both methods are used to faciliate sharing among users. I am not sure why the dual funcitionality exists. It would be better if Furl used it similarly to Spurl. Spurl uses folders and tags to facilitate organization while only tags are used for sharing.

Furl does have the ability to make items private. However, this only occurs if a bookmark is placed in a topic that is labeled as private. This is a little bit of an improvement over del.icio.us. It seems to me that the public/private switch should be on the bookmark itself not on the folder, keyword or topic.

Furl users are able to “subscribe” to other Furl users. These subscriptions produce “headlines” in the users account whenever a new bookmark is added.

Furl also has the standard “Latest” and “Most Popular” bookmark sections.

Overall, it does not seem that Furl substantially improves the social bookmarking experience over and above del.icio.us. The look and feel is much more user friendly, but in terms of features there is not anything that truly distinguishes Furl from del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us Review

Del.icio.us is probably the most popular social bookmarking site.

Click on the link to read more about social bookmarking .

The best way to describe del.icio.us is to let it describe itself. From the del.icio.us About page:

» del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.
» Once you’ve registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser (see below). When you find a web page you’d like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you’ll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others.
» You can access your list of links from any web browser. By default, your links are shown to you in reverse chronological order, with those you’ve added most recently at the top. In addition to viewing by date, you can also view all links in a specific category (you define your own categories as you add the links), or search your links for keywords.
» What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

Del.icio.us is fairly basic. Second generation social bookmarking sites take the core of del.icio.us and have added a more complete set of features. It will be interesting to see whether del.icio.us will continue to develop a more feature-rich set of options or remain a fairly simple tool.

del.icio.us offers the following fuctionality:

• Viewing bookmarks by tag or cloud
• Viewing bookmarks alphabetically or by frequency
• Viewing bookmarks by tag. Tagging is a much better organizational tool than folders.
• Tag each bookmark with one word descriptions.
• Create bundles or groupings of bookmarks. These bundles can have their own tags.
• Subscribe to particular tags or users. This will create an alert when a new bookmark has been created with that tag or from a particular user.

This feature set is more than enough for the beginning social bookmarker. Since del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site, there are plenty of opportunities to learn about what others are bookmarking.

Viewing a user’s bookmarks is as easy as clicking on their user name. There is no privacy protection on bookmarks. All bookmarks are visible to everybody. This is probably one downside to using del.icio.us. It would be helpful if users had the choice to make a bookmark visible or invisible.

New to Social Bookmarking?

Then here is an article to explain it all to you.

Essentially, social bookmarking takes Browser bookmarks/favorites and makes them a shared resource. Share your favorities with friends and colleagues simply and easily.

I will be reviewing several of the social bookmarking sites in the weeks to come.