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:
I have this idea for a webapp that I have been working on for the past few days here. It involves an RSS reading interface that would be more useful for people that are on the move or traveling in any way. The reader actually has a robut audio interface that reads feeds as well as allowing the user to access traveling widgets and to move between and share feeds.
I like the idea because I have had times where I haven’t been able to actually sit at a computer and I want to get access to my news. One especially useful scenario would be for driving. When I’m driving I can’t exactly be staring at a computer screen (may it be a PDA, UMPC, or a laptop) because I have to keep my eye on the road. So I could start reading a feed to me while I drive. The app would also be able to recognize words that the user says to it. Think of GOOG-411: You call and it gives you search results with numbers. That would be each article in a feed. So the audio is going through some contents and the user says “4.” This tells the webapp to actually read through article 4. You could also tell the webapp while it’s reading the headline and teaser to “read this.”
I’m sure the idea is not unheard of. I wonder if it would be difficult to implement such an application. I am now making it my quest to learn enough to implement such an application as the one I outlined here. This blog will, for the time being, be a project development log for this project.
The first step that I will take will be to figure out what I will need to know and whether or not I can do this in an open-source framework. So I will begin searching for information on information systems :P. I will then attempt to do some project outlining. If anyone has anything that could help me in my quest, please do tell!
