For years I had good bookmark data at my fingertips and could often answer emails by sending a list of links, each of which was a needle plucked from a virtual haystack, along with some annotations. Entropy has intervened and my links are degraded. How nice it would be to have a local wikipedia with selected topics of interest to me automatically updated. Or rather, a local citizendium–wikipedia with authoritative, attributable content.
Long before del.icio.us appeared I used PowerMarks from Kaylon. This was a great tool for synchronizing bookmarks across computers and it provided these additional benefits. It
- provided full text search of one’s notes
- monitored bookmarks for validity & changes
- recorded when you last visited a site
- provided shortcut macros for ready access to sites
- offered fast remote backup and synchronization
plus browser integration and more.
The developers ignored pleas to turn it into a collaborative tool. Eventually, I defected to del.ici.ous, then, when Yahoo bought it, to Furl. Furl was often too slow, but it did at least allow private bookmarks and the export of bookmarks. Today I went back to del.icio.us because the recently released browser plugin for Firefox seems like a big improvement and Furl is losing market share.
We’re still largely stuck with just bookmarks and tags. The bookmarks are just html, whereas they could be any microformat. Communities of interest are not the norm. At best one can work backwards only to individuals, whether using StumbleUpon or any similar service. Digg and other social news sites that rate content currently publish what’s new and what’s popular. Every vote is equal. I would be far more interested in knowing what my friends and colleagues were bookmarking and to be able to establish what’s important!
When saving a bookmark why can’t I have a list of individuals and groups with whom I can choose to share records–or not? I have yet to come across an elegant solution. Sharing photos in groups is no problem with Flickr, why not with del.icio.us?
There are some tastier options: Magnolia, for e.g., allows sharing with selected individuals. However, since no solution has become popular, potentially good information is siloed and Google or serendipity is required to unlock it. Can Microsoft Tagspace change this? I’ve always thought Groove was something that could be usefully applied to the problem, but it needs to be much more widely available, even free, and on other platforms.
Please: connect me to LinkedIn or similar, let me browse and search the bookmarks on my network via
- a tag cloud
- the full text of annotations (my own)
- those of individuals (who have agreed, on a topic by topic basis)
- those of groups I’m a member of
and, progressively, by degrees of separation: the network of people and groups known to and trusted by people I know, giving weight according to distance of separation and reputation (see below). This discovery process, allied to supporting different formats, could do things like keeping contact data records in sync in a community.
But this is if I have to go looking for information. Why shouldn’t it be possible to receive information–a TagFeed or TopicFeed from trusted sources? We did back in the days of offline Compuserve navigators like OzCis, admittedly from a central source, which makes the problem easier to solve.
Commenting on an earlier post, Microsoft’s Korby Parnell pointed me to Claimspace, a coming development which relates to TagSpace, like so:
Tagspace enables you to say, ‘I found this resource and it appears to be worthy of my attention.’
Conversely, Claimspace will enable you to say, ‘I created this resource, wish to be recognized for it on these terms ___, and I hope you find it worthy of your attention. What do you think?’
Clearly, a good a way of gaining reputation points for individual publishers in a closed system. It would be great to then be able to subscribe to the tag topics of reputable sources in the world at large. The content could be a lot more than qualified information resources. It could be problems or issues. Who in the world has tagged “hosted CRM solutions?” is a lot less interesting than finding out that a colleague of someone known to you working for a similar organization has done so recently.
A side effect of building a solution that accepted information feeds from trusted sources is that it could largely solve the spam problem.
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