When I first become obsessed with the internet I was very hesitant to try social bookmarking. At the time, the only one that I had access to was del.icio.us. I would sometimes end up on their website and get pretty flustered. This initial learning curve is what turned me on at first. All of that information stored in such a simple interface. It was quite beautiful but I needed some learning before I could fully utilize the services.
The unique design scheme of social bookmarking is what attracts and deters people. Social bookmarking has turned “tagging” into a near art form that has been gobbled up by anyone interested in creating a more powerful user interface for their web application or service.
Tagging allows for incredible customization. Firstly, it does not constrain users as to what ways they can differentiate the content they are interested in. For instance, let’s say that Jimmy wants to collect articles for learning the Python programming language. Anytime he finds a website that serves this usage, he can add it to his social bookmarking webapp. When he is asked to tag the website, he — the user — decides how he wants to organize his content. Instead of a site giving him the popular ratings and usage of Python tutorials, he has the ability to set up experience levels (’beginner,’ ‘intermediate,’ and ‘advanced’) or perhaps tagging what particular aspect of Python is discussed in the article. This allows social bookmarking sites to maintain near infinite versatility without the need for deciding what users will want to organize their content under. Part of me wonders if the inventor of this versatile tagging interface was focusing on the DRY principle way too much and just coded a way for each tag to have a view of its own, but that’s besides the point: it’s a gorgeous use of technology and after I become acquainted with its ways, have become fully involved with social bookmarking, almost to the point of insanity. Continue Reading »
Social networks have been at the top of the totem pole in terms of what’s cool in the world of web technology. Most websites and webapps have begun to add elements of social networking through comments, discussions, messaging, and content categorization and rating. There are sites now like Ning that allow people to create entire networks around any kind of idea they want. Ning has caught on fairly well and there are now active communities such as Blog365, Indiepublic, and my fledgling New Left Network. So Ning provides a really excellent and chic way to create and organize people into a network.
Over at Bricabox, the idea is to create the same atmosphere and implement them in a beautiful way but for content instead of people. I personally think the idea has a lot of potential. There is a similar engine out there called Pligg that allows for Digg clones. While Pligg has a lot of potential in itself, Bricabox is set up to be more open to any kind of content aggregation and categorization. (Check out the Mashable article here.)
I played around with the platform this morning and found it a rather compelling tool. I have been working out an idea about semantic news for a while now and I thought I would attempt to try and implement it in Bricabox. I ran into some problems with it but this is understandable. My ideas around semantic news have some potential to be a fairly radical launch. I don’t expect a product that just launched to be capable of some of the interactions I am looking for. But in the process of twiddling with it I did find it really capable of working with social content. It has a lot of customization that is possible and with a little bit of bling and intuitive design concepts they could mass market this. It doesn’t require a lot of work to figure out but I know that most muggles will find it fairly difficult.
All in all though I greatly enjoy the idea and implementation and I strongly suggest taking a peak at it and it’s capabilities. Here is a little video intro from their frontpage:
There is an amazing article written by Mark Pilgrim about the problems with DRM and books. It revolves around issues with the current Amazon Kindle and specifically some of the marketing that the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was doing. This is a really good juxtaposition of some thoughts that have been running through everyone’s minds in regards to all of this. I am glad to see that at least the music industry is starting to realize what a failure DRM has been. Let’s hope that as a people we remind Amazon that we don’t just hate Music DRMed, we hate the idea of DRM.
