Celebrating the most important marriage of the week…

April 28, 2011 By

And no, it’s not the royal wedding. As much as I hope Kate and William have a long and happy life together, they’re not friends or acquintances, and as part of a consititutional monarchy, they’re unlikely to have any effect on my life. I’m celebrating the marriage of Delicious, the incredibly useful and powerful social bookmarking service which was neglected since acquisition by Yahoo, with new owners AVOS, which despite sounding like a major shopping website, is actually the new company from Youtube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

I’ve written in the past about Delicious alternatives, and how I ended up moving from using Delicious as my primary bookmarking tool to using Diigo with Delicious as a backup. But this could change things.

  • Hurley and Chen have a lot of experience in social information sharing – that’s essentially what Youtube is. Upload your video data and use some quick and simple social tools to hopefully get a response.
  • Delicious may have stagnated but there’s a huge amount of data there, just waiting to be utilised more effectively.
  • The AVOS press release regarding the acquisition references making it ‘easier and more fun to save, share and discover‘, plus ‘The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload‘. Two of those issues have been key to Delicious, and the third is something which is become an increasingly timely problem.

And lastly, I have a bit of a hypothesis that this may be a project that Hurley and Chen will look to build longterm rather than setting up for an acquisition in 18 months as happened with Youtube. Firstly, Delicious has been on the block for a while, and social bookmarking tools aren’t exactly hot commodities. Secondly, this isn’t their hope to make enough cash to live on for the rest of their lives – they’ve been there and done that. Much like Kevin Rose and Ev Williams are ‘pivoting’ what they are working on, or Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder, is returning to Reddit as an advisor, I suspect Delicious could be something that Hurley and Chen cared enough about to acquire and set-up as something they hold onto – if not, why spend the money on acquiring an existing community when their names and expertise could probably build up something from scratch to the same level pretty fast with no acquisition cost?

That last paragraph is all optimism and speculation, but one thing I do know is that we’re sure to see some positive changes to Delicious, and it’s now being run by people who really know the power of data, social and sharing.

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Open social bookmarking service to rival Delicious

April 1, 2011 By

A quick check has shown that I’ve been using Delicious since November 2006, although my addiction to Google Reader means I’ve never used social bookmarking as heavily as some friends and colleagues. Around two years later, in October 2008, I started using Diigo as my primary social bookmarking tool – not only does it rival Delicious in terms of general features, but it has a handy auto-export for Delicious, meaning that I would always have a duplicate of the 600+ bookmarks I stored since (lately the majority have been saved to auto-feed out to 140char.com)

But although Delicious has been threatened with sale by owner Yahoo, and Diigo has performed faultlessly, all the new innovation and launches in storing and sharing links have either been aggregators for the iPad, or semantic tools which seem to have failed to gain enough internet from people – presumably because such a large percentage of internet users neither know nor care what the hell ‘semantic’ means or can do for them.

So it’s nice that the horror of April Fools Day for an information-obsessed tech fan has been alleviated by news of Freelish.us (h/t/ Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb). It’s a new social bookmarking service based on the existing Status.net alternative to Twitter, which is standards-based, and allows you to either use the hosted service, or install it on your own servers, change the design, and in the future, Status.net installations will have the social bookmarking features as an option.

So you can now also find me as badgergravling on Freelish.us.

It’ll be interesting to see whether there are more possibilities for Freelish.us than with Delicious and Diigo. I’ve never really built huge networks on social bookmarking sites (50 on delicious, 8 on diggo), compared with social networks (3.5k on Twitter, 500+ on FB), and perhaps the mix of bookmarketing and social networking will change that in this case.

The other reason for finding it interesting is whether the ability to install and run Status.net and Freelish.us will come in useful for my own businesses and their clients. Certainly communicating and sharing information within the company firewall is possible with paid and free tools already, but this might also up a middle ground for creating a client service, for example. Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch, and I continue to be an impressed observer of how Status.net operates, including identi.ca.

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Last night a cloud saved my life…

January 20, 2010 By

Cloud-based computing is a popular topic at the moment, and it’s opening up a plethora of possibilities for ways to interface with data. But to be honest, the way it’s helped me in the last 24 hours is much more important at the moment.

Tomorrow I’ve got the pleasure of speaking at a conference and everything was well-organised and prepared until a small error resulted in the saved presentation file being wiped off the face of the earth… And in a long story of unwise decisions cut short, there was no backup available. All presentation and all notes gone…

Except…

While I didn’t have the Word.doc with notes, I save pretty much everything I could ever want or need to reference. It’s tagged on Google Reader in the case of RSS feeds from about 200+ sites (My shared Google Reader items are here), and/or tagged on Diigo as a social bookmark. I use Diigo for two reasons – one: when I first started using it, the options for autoposting to blogs looked simpler to implement than Delicious, and two: It features an autoshare to Delicious option, meaning that I essentially have an automatic backup for either social bookmarking site.

Combined with a quick check of any relevant emails via Gmail, it means that pretty much every reference source is available at home, at work, or on the train if the wifi holds up.

And after the reminder about regular backups, I’ve made sure that it’s saved regular both on my laptop and removable hard drive. And even more useful is the fact it’s saved on Dropbox, which means it’s synched across laptop and desktop, available anywhere with an internet connection, and even better – if the presentation ends up too big for most corporate email services, I can easily share it via Dropbox for someone to download. Plus Dropbox has a 2GB storage limit for free.

I’m not saying any of this as any kind of paid endorsement (although free upgrades are nice, and paid advertising on here is never a bad thing), just as a public reminder about the benefits of backing up, and of using three services which are pretty much an essential part of my life now, and that I’d rather not do without.

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Google RSS Reader finally allows social bookmarking

August 13, 2009 By

One of my guilty confessions is that I’ve been doing less linking and sharing of other sites on places like Stumbleupon recently than in the past.

A major reason for that is that I’m generally going through my reading on the train in Google RSS reader, and not actually visiting sites. Combine the slow speed of the onboard wifi with the hassle of coming out of my RSS feed to recommend things on a regular basis, and you might be sympathetic as to why it’s a bit of a hassle.

But no longer – in addition to the places which allow me to import my RSS shared items (Friendfeed, Publish 2 etc), Google’s Matt Cutts revealed today that Google Reader now has a ‘send to’ option for Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg etc from within the feedreader, and that you can also set it up for sites which aren’t currently listed.

Like him, it’s a feature I’ve wanted since I started using Google for RSS reading, and combined with the improved social tools for sharing and following with other Google RSS readers (And with an 84% share in one example, there’s quite a few!), and RSS is back in the game alongside sharing links on Twitter etc.

(Incidentally, to enable it, just go to settings, and it’s under the ‘Send To’ tab.)

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Comment with your Twitter/Facebook profiles

May 17, 2009 By

I’ve finally started upgrading the back end of this blog to start tackling the increasingly important issue of connecting with the discussions posts can prompt in a myriad of places.

Whereas discussion was generally confined to the Comments section in days of old, now it can spring up on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc.

As a commenter, I’ve found Backtype to be useful for aggregating the comments I’ve made, but when it came to starting to tie it all together here, Disqus was an obvious, and easy choice to install and start using.

All of the comments made directly have now been imported into the new system, and I’ve added the ability to post with your Twitter and Facebook usernames, as well as importing discussion around a post from locations like Friendfeed. You can even post a video comment via Seesmic.

I’ve also installed a Disqus widget to show the Top Commenters, Recent Comments and Popular Comments, so you should see that start to hopefully fill out in the next few days in the right side bar.

In addition, I’ve also started combining my saved bookmarks by posting to both Diigo and Delicious, to provide some cloud-based backup and to see which is the best route for publishing any links I want to share – as well as looking at which plugins/widgets might be contributing to long loading times.

All aimed at providing a better service to you, the readers that make all this worthwhile, so let me know if there’s anything you’d suggest, or things you think I should definitely keep or get rid of!

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A social bookmarking question?

October 26, 2008 By

I’ve started looking at automatically creating some links posts, both on here and 140char.com, as there are some links I’d like to quickly share without feeling the need to add my own waffle. And I’d like to pick them out for more attention than plugging in my Google Reader shared items, which feature the constant stream of a closet librarian…

The question is whether there’s a way of only sharing links with a certain tag for auto-posting, which I can’t seem to find as an option for either Delicious, or Magnolia? I could have an account for each blog, but it would be a right royal pain to have to keep swapping between the two.

Any ideas?

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It’s all change on the interweb

August 1, 2008 By

As always my plans to spend a weekend dedicated to catching up, and even getting ahead, on my blogging etc seem to have been destroyed before Friday is even over, thanks to a horrible noise from the exhaust on my car. I guess that’s what you get for buying something cheap and unusual!

And that clumsily links into the amount of change that’s occurring at the moment to major sites:

New look Facebook has been talked about a lot, and it’s now available. And to be honest, I’m really undecided about the design. It certainly makes it more blog/lifestream than profile page, and it moves applications out of the way, which is good for dealing with application addicts. I’m surprised the advertising is moved out to a column where it is easier to ignore over time, although it did catch my eye the first time it logged.

And there’s new look Delicious. Notice the lack of del.icio.us, as it’s now become www.delicious.com, as they were seeing all sorts of versions of the name being used. A bit of a shame in some ways, as it was one major way to stand out from the crowd. Ma.gnolia might feel a bit silly now! Again the design is cleaner and more modern, and a little lifestream-esque.

And you may have heard the tiniest of whispers around the web that tiny new startup Google is being challenged by a new search engine called Cuil, which claims to index more pages than Google, and return more linked results. One interesting ploy is that they promise information for each search will be anonymous – fine in theory but what will happen in the event of a court case? At the moment, returns a bit flakey, like this one for Dan Thornton. But I’m going to give it some time before making a judgement – I was initially unimpressed with Mahalo, but I’ve grown to like it more and more as time goes by. The best thing about Mahalo’s human-powered search is that the official plugin allows you to display an information box alongside your Google results – meaning it can save you a few clicks if you’re researching something which is covered.

And rounding off a pretty quick skim, is the news for social media marketing, research and business people that Forrester has bought Jupiter Research, which is pretty big news in that space.

Now if I can just stop the exhaust falling off the car, I might be able to catch up with a  few things.

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Why I love links

June 28, 2008 By

By nature, I’m a frustrated librarian and a compulsive hoarder. My music collection is in alphabetical and chronological order, and my loft is packed with old video consoles and other collections which I know fatherhood will stop me from indulging in, except as family heirlooms in 30 years time!

Part of this is a reluctance to lend CDs and books, even to close friends, for fear of them being lost, or being returned with the spine of the book broken beyond all recognition.

But now access to knowledge and entertainment is instantly sharable from the moment of discovery. From the almost infinite resource of online knowledge I can share findings via links, Del.icio.us bookmarks, or RSS. My tastes in music are logged, and accessible via Last.fm, and TV and videos get distributed from Youtube, the BBC iPLayer, or where ever they’re found. And it doesn’t matter if my friends lose them, and they can’t return them broken. In fact, even if, God forbid, I lost all my saved files and links, I could find most of the memorable ones that mattered in a few minutes with Google.

There’s a popular quote by author and broadcaster Leo Laporte which has spread via shared links:

“I’m less likely to read print lately because I can’t tag, bookmark, and share the stories. Info gathering has become a social process for me”

And it rings true. Print and physical copies are now back-ups, or objects for sentimental value. They’re for those rare occasions that you want to get away from it all.

And that’s why I love links!

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Instead of booking an expensive social media conference

April 20, 2008 By

You’ll probably get more long term value by using the three-figure booking fee to encourage your employees to actually sign up for Facebook, Del.icio.us, Digg, or Twitter. *

*Does not apply to the myriad of really good unconferences and workshops springing up, and organised by people who admit they don’t know the absolute answer to everything – but are working to get there. Examples include Measurementcamp or MediaCamp Bucks ’08 (Disclosure: I’m running a session there.)

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