Digital Divide headlines

Or, at least, that's one way to think about it. Folks on this forum may be familiar with del.icio.us a bookmark sharing application. Essentially, you sign up for an account, store bookmarks with keywords so that you can find them later. The nice part is that you can also view the things that other people are storing.

I thought the keyword "digitaldivide" might have some interest to folks in this forum:
http://del.icio.us/tag/digitaldivide

Think of it as other people scouring the web and sharing interesting links. Some of the links may repeat and others may be off topic. By and large, I'm finding it a useful way to gather information.

-webb

la mal & friends,inc

will be opening a center in biloxi,mississippi

Glad to see a write up on a social bookmarking tool. The more non-profit groups help populate social bookmarking databases with their bookmarks, the more valuable they will be to other non-profits in the future. Right now there is far too much emphasis on geeky stuff for its own sake.

Delicious is very cool, but I don't believe it's the most useful social bookmarking application available. I far prefer Furl.net. It's interface is more clear and easier to use and it offers many advanced features that Delicious does not. The two best are 1. Furl saves a full copy of the article you are bookmarking, so even if the link goes down you will have your own copy of the page and 2. Furl's "recomendations" are fantastic. The program displays who else has Furled whatever article you are looking at in your archive (as Delicious does as well) but also says "people who have furled this article have also furled these other articles..." Furthermore, it will look at your entire archive and recomend other articles as well as other users with similar archives. You can then choose to recieve the daily updates of new bookmarks from other users with similar interests, either by email or RSS feed. I've selected 8 or 9 other users whose daily Furl feeds are now some of the most valuable content streams I read. My furl archive is at http://furl.net/members/marshallkirkpatrick

I wrote a blog entry on tips for using Furl here .

I have found recently that Furl doesnot work for IE on Mac OS 9, so orgs with old macs and IE may want to use Spurl.com instead, which seems to have many of the same features. But I'm just checking that out now.

See also Technorati Tag Search, which searches for your search terms in blog posts, Delicious and Furl bookmarks, as well as several photo sharing applications.

[warning: unexplained geekery below. if you've got questions, feel free to ask 'em.]

Marshall,

Thanks for your thoughts on social bookmarking. I agree that the value of the tools increases as a diverse audience uses them.

I also think that the emergence of things like Gataga helps to keep people from having to use all one tool. People can choose their social bookmark application of choice and then search (and subscribe to an RSS feed for all of them).

Still you point about the best tool is well taken. I love del.icio.us because of the ease with which I can search tags and users. The last time I used Furl (which was a while ago) that wasn't true.

In fact, over on ConsultantCommons.org, I've been collaborating with others on a document to examine the features and current use of the existing crop of social bookmarking tool with an eye toward making a recommendation for use. You can see this evolving document at Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison.

If you'd like to contribute, please feel free. Registered and logged in users can make edits to the document itself (look for the edit tab up at the top to get to a WYSIWYG text entry box) or make comments on the work as it exists.

At this point, we've collected some existing tools, structured the whole document, and added the points of comparison. The next step is for people to pick tools like they'd like to examine and fill in the analysis accordingly.

webb

Unfortunately, there still isn't one way to do perfect search of all important parts of any of these databases. When searching social bookmarking databases, I start with http://tagcentral.net which, similar to Gataga, searches tags over a large number of tag employing databases.

Furl's native search, however, does offer some important advantages. I've been thinking lately about how important it is to search not just tags, but other fields as well. Furl uses a weighted search algorithm that includes search of user applied keywords, the comment and clipping fields and the full text of the article itself. When you search your own archive in Furl, you also search the full text of the cached copy. This helps with document recall by going beyond the limited tags already applied by users, something that evolves over time and is a good compliment to full text search rather than a substitute for it.

One other feature of Furl is that it allows you to view your archive and the archives of other users by entry dates, but also rating and number of page views. I know that articles from my blog, for example, having been furled by either me or another furl user, have sometimes been viewed via Furl search results up to 30 times. I can easily see which ones are being viewed most and least via Furl in my arhive with one click. This is part of the reason I Furl my own articles (I save in delicious too), so as to get them into those databases right away. No need to wait for someone else to submit/save them.

I wrote about this as a part of my blog posting routine here.

Yay for this article's top placement in TechSoup again. It's so interesting. I like to read industry mags like KM World and InfoWorld, and think "how is the nptech community striving to achieve the same functionality with much lower budgets?" Social Bookmarking is one part of that, I think.

Since this discussion is quickly evolving into comparring social bookmarking tools, I have to throw BlinkList into the mix.

It is a brand new site that we just launched a few weeks ago and so far we have received some great reviews and feedback. If you want to read a review, here is one by a good online education blog. Just follow this link -
Learning in the blink of an eye

Would be great if any of you gave BlinkList a try and let us know your thoughts since we are eager to learn how to improve our site to meet the needs of the BlinkList community of users.

Mike

I've read some good reviews of blinklist. I'm looking forward to a chance to play with it.

As we think about this, it's easy (I know for me it's *very* easy) to get bogged down in a discussion of tool specifics. I'd also love to tap y'all's collective wisdom about why nonprofits should be interested in these tools as well as how they can be used. Any thoughts?

Some quick ideas:

*They can be used as an alternative to copying and pasting web found research into Word docs, the way lots of people research.

*They can be used to highlight articles of interest to a particular community in a much more efficient and less intrusive way than mass emails. See, for example, http://nptech.krazy.com/

*They make articles you've saved searchable later, so your decision making is not just informed by what you've read most recently.

So many things are possible with these tools.

To add to your list, Marshall:

* they can be used to encourage your constituents to share information with you -- see classify your own data

mw

Wow, there seems to be a lot of people reading this thread, but not many posting comments. That's a shame, but glad to see it's of interest.

Thought I'd refer folks over to a great interview about tagging here. I blogged about the interview here.

Two good parts of the discussion concern 1. the differences between tagging and using folders and 2. the use of tagging to create attention streams, like the nptech tag, for the non-profit tech community. Folks heavily involved in the tagging world are psyched about both of the above uses.

It seems like there are many social bookmarking tools. Everyone has a different opinion on which one is better.

I have only used del.icio.us and backflip. I like del.icio.us better. I wrote a blog entry called Comparing del.icio.us and backflip.

I have shared many bookmarks on del.icio.us using the digitaldivide tag.

I am very interested in this topic.

Emily
http://eweinb04.blogspot.com