bookmarks

Forbes may acquire social bookmarking site Clipmarks

VentureBeat reported this evening that "an inside source" had informed them that Forbes Magazine--home publication of the now-outed Fake Steve Jobs--has acquired Clipmarks, a New York-based start-up that allows users to share snippets and bits of Web pages rather than simply a hyperlink or an entire article. This is done through a downloadable browser plug-in that enables "highlighting" up to a certain amount of text on a site.

No financial details were provided, but VentureBeat's Eric Eldon wrote that "Forbes finds the service useful for helping their reporters collect and share information … Read more

Social bookmarking explained with hand gestures, puppetry

Some Web 2.0 concepts don't make sense to people unless you break it down to them in ways they can understand. We do our best with our Newbie Guides for things like Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, and Facebook. Along similar lines comes a video about Del.icio.us, and social bookmarking in general, from Common Craft--a consulting company that does Web videos. This may be viral marketing, but it's very well executed and a joy to watch. I'd hire these guys for my start-up video.

[via Digital Inspiration and DownloadSquad]

AM-DeadLink: Cure bookmark overload

If it takes you longer to locate a particular browser bookmark than it does to search for that same Web page, it may be time to rev up AM-DeadLink. This nifty freeware utility for managing browser bookmarks becomes increasingly useful as your favorites list grows more congested.

With one button, AM-DeadLink produces a list of bookmarks on the browser you select, pointing out broken or unlisted links. Another button bumps problem bookmarks to the top of the list, saving you from hunting and pecking among the thickets of text. A button identified by an image of cloned human figures reveals any duplicate bookmarks that may have been tucked away in multiple subfolders. Unwanted links are easily disposed of with a click on the recycle bin. For a quick reminder of what leads to what, users can preview bookmark destinations within the app. Backing up the bookmark list serves as a more long-term reminder.… Read more

Mister Wong launches English version of social-bookmarking service

The first question that pops into my head when checking out new social-bookmarking services is, How does it stack up to Del.icio.us? It's one of the most popular social-bookmarking services, and also one of the oldest. Mister Wong is the new kid on the block. It's a social bookmarking service that's been around in Europe since early 2006 and claims to be the second-most-popular bookmarking service worldwide. It launched the English version this morning, and I think it's good enough to make a mark in the bookmarking crowd.

Like other bookmarking services, Mister Wong … Read more

Firefox magic: Kill your Search box

I know that 90 percent of Mozilla Firefox (download it for Windows or Mac) users who read this post will think I'm nuts. I can hear you now: "I love my Firefox search engines! How will I search Amazon?!"

Well, I love my search engines, too, but that silly Search box in the Firefox toolbar simply takes up too much room for my liking, especially because you can use all of the functionality of your favorite search engines directly from the Firefox location bar (also called the "address bar" by people like me). I'll show you how.… Read more

Digg on iPhone, title says it all

Yesterday the Digg team unveiled an iPhone-friendly version of their site. The lighter-weight version shows 10 stories at a time and lets users sort back and forth between pages using large navigation arrows at the bottom of the screen. Each story shows how many Diggs it currently has, along with a permalinked page that contains a brief description, link to the full story, and the top five comments. Best of all, users can log in and Digg stories.

It's also worth noting this isn't the same version of Digg for the iPhone we wrote about last month. That … Read more

Digg on iPhone, title says it all

Coming soon is a way to browse the top stories by day or week view.

iPhone link: http://www.digg.com/iphone … Read more

Hanging in the high-tech faculty lounge

BOSTON, Mass.--Blackboard, an educational software company, announced a social-networking site for students and professors on Tuesday at its BbWorld '07 conference.

Scholar, the social bookmarking site that Blackboard launched in January, works much like Delicious in that people can see links relevant to articles based on their tagged interests. Scholar is centrally hosted by Blackboard and integrates with any schools or users who subscribe to Blackboard applications.

The company is now expanding Scholar into a social-networking site where researchers of even the most obscure topics can find each other.

As in other social-networking sites, there are different levels of &… Read more

Google Web History is taking over my life

First it was the Google Toolbar, then it was an integrated search box in the corner of my browser. It's no secret Google's been slowly attempting to take control of our computers for years. The desktop search is a testament to that. What's really creepy is the new Web History tracking service Google quietly rolled out last week. This new service doesn't go after items on your computer, rather what you're looking at online.

Google Web History archives everything you've searched for (while signed in to your Google account), and gives you a bookmarklet to bookmark sites you like. The whole idea is to make the browsing experience something you can search through and access from any computer, anywhere. Search history has items listed by time of search, with the most recent ones on a front page.

Searches are broken down by Google category like Web, Images, Maps, and (the now misnamed) Froogle. Users can also see how many searches they've done by month, day, and hour. Drilling down deeper, you can also go in and click on the number of searches and see the top sites and results. It's a total analytic overload.

The real creepy part in all this is the integration you get if you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser. This will track every single site you're visiting, and apply the same aforementioned analytics so you can keep track of which sites or services you're using the most. Sure, we've had browsing history for years, but it's always been localized. It's a little alarming to see it online, regardless of the fact it can't be shared with others.

The good news is that users can opt-out of Google's Web History program, along with the capability to delete any item that's been archived. The bad news is that if you have a Google account, all your search activity has been tracked since last week.

For more shots of the service, keep reading.… Read more

Hands-on with MySpace News: Far from a Digg killer

The much-anticipated Digg-like news service from MySpace launched early this morning. The front page combines popular stories from the service's 24 categories and a user-democratized voting system for promotion and demotion. Stories are pulled from various sources by using technology from Newroo, an aggregation service MySpace acquired last year.

The voting system isn't based on simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, as on Digg, Netscape, and Reddit. Instead, MySpace News uses a five-star rating system, with "loved it" and "hated it" on opposite ends of the spectrum.

MySpace News also features a local events section for 12 major cities. We tried out the San Francisco page, and there were a number of events listed, but no dates or locations for them, just small text summaries.

Any time you click on a story, MySpace will redirect you to the site where the story resides, and add a small navigation pane to bring you back to MySpace (like Netscape did when it launched its community news site). The navigation pane has a rating tool, a listing of three related stories, and a link to the story's URL to send to friends. Interestingly enough, MySpace will take over the site's URL and give it a news.myspace.com designation, so if you send that link to friends, the MySpace News branding will come with it. Very sneaky.

Tuite a few things are missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There's no way to show which stories you've been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can't see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network. There's also no way to submit stories. According to the FAQ, this will be added later down the road. For now, stories are fed to the service from blogs or Web sites and put into a pool to be picked up by users. Finally, there's no way to discuss stories that are on the service.

In other words, almost all the features that make Digg worth coming back to are missing from MySpace News. While the service will likely flourish because of its built-in user base of MySpace millions, it hasn't been built from the start to let its users take the reins beyond just clicking buttons. It's a very thin social news experience.

For more screenshots, keep reading.