loose wire blog

Bookmarks Are Dead. Long Live Bookmarks

Interesting post by Mathew Ingram over at the Globe and Mail on the new-look del.icio.us. His conclusion: great, but who bookmarks anymore?

I got all shirty at first, but actually he’s right. It’s not that people don’t bookmark, it’s that the purpose of bookmarking is less obvious now than it used to be.

The point of bookmarking stuff is, presumably, to

1. save stuff you want to go back to
2. save stuff you want to share
3. save stuff you don’t want to forget exists
4. save stuff in a place alongside similar stuff
5. save stuff as a regular port of call

These have all changed in recent years.

RSS killed the bookmark

5. has largely been taken over by RSS. Why visit a website when it will come to you?

Sharing killed the bookmark

2. can be better shared via Google Reader—sort of—but now increasingly in things like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. And of course StumbleUpon, digg.com etc. We are more interested in just pushing stuff out there in a timely fashion—no use in sharing something if everyone else already knows about it. These links are as likely to be fat cat videos or news stories as much as services, products and more ‘permanent’ links.

Which leaves what?

1. and 3. are slightly similar. But saving something you won’t forget and something you will are slightly different—the difference between putting car keys somewhere you wont’ forget them, as opposed to putting car keys somewhere so you remember you have a car.

An online equivalent is your bank account website, say: You’re unlikely to forget you have a bank account, but you might forget the address—or hate typing in the address again. Whereas a cool new tool for collecting the email addresses of people who share your middle name might sound like something worth visiting again, but chances are you’ll forget it exists unless you save it somewhere.

So, saving something you go back to regularly makes sense as an in-house bookmark. I use the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox for these links (removing the name to save space):

and then I use the Google Browser Sync to make sure these look the same over different browsers. (Although I just noticed that it’s no longer available for download. What happened there?)

So that’s 1. dealt with. But this doesn’t really make sense more infrequent bookmarks, or bookmarks you’d just like to check out at some future date. The screen real-estate is finite, after all.

This is where I think bookmarking becomes more of a useful service. And tagging. But it still doesn’t work that well. Tagging is a great tool—and del.icio.us has made it much easier by suggesting tags for things—but I still find navigating my own tags too time-consuming a task. And adding them into clouds etc just seems like something someone else should be doing for me. 

This is where we also get onto 4.—saving stuff so that it ends up alongside similar stuff. What I mean by this is that we may not be able to remember all the social tools we’ve come across that allow us to, say converse with other people who share the same middle name, but we know we saved it somewhere. So when we add another bookmark we want to be able to be sure that it somehow connects to those other bookmarks we’ve saved, but quickly and without too much pain.

An option here is PersonalBrain, which is another way to save bookmarks in a way that makes not only finding them easier, but also guarantees, through the web-like links, that you’d find connections with other bookmarks (or bits of information) that you’ve saved:

But it’s not perfect. Like del.icio.us, it requires pruning and management, and while it’s easier enough to add links—just drag ‘em in—it’s not as fast as one would like.

Indeed, I suspect that what we’re really talking about is speed. We want to be able to save stuff in a way that makes search and retrieval fast and painless. We want to be able to find what we’re looking for, and also be reminded that something is there for us to find.

Hence the Google solution, or the ask-my-buddies-on-twitter solution that a lot of Mathew’s commenters have talked about.

Perhaps the real change we’re talking about is the one that twitter has wrought. On the one hand it’s forced us to be more concise. It’s also enabled us to quickly communicate with a select crowd—the people we commune with on twitter—who are, at least for now, as cooperative and helpful as the early denizens of the net. So why bother rooting through your del.icio.us tags when you can tap into the wisdom of the twitter crowd?

That is what these services—and products like PersonalBrain—have to compete with. I’m guessing that what will evolve is a combined service where a request that is sent via twitter—anyone remember the name of that service that lets you talk to people with the same middle name?—would simultaneously search your own databases of links and saved data: your Google Reader shared items, your del.icio.us tags, your browsing history, your friends’ browsing history and tags. The answers—automated, human--would merge together and the results would organize themselves into a list.

Which might itself become a new form of content.

So, in short, bookmarks are dead, long live bookmarks. They are still the best signposts we have for getting around the web, but we have moved beyond the idea of needing to save them in some order. What we want know is to be able to find them quickly—and to be able to have what we find put in a broader context.

Does something like this exist already?

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us,tagging,search,bookmarks,yahoo,personalbrain,folksonomy

Software That Plays Tag

This week's WSJ.com column (subscription only, I'm afraid) is about Jiglu, a sort of automatic tagging service you can see in action somewhere on this blog:

If you're a writer, you hope your words will be etched in stone for eternity. If you're a blogger, you're happy if someone stumbles on your writings a few days after you posted them. Blogs, partly because they often consist mainly of commentary on things that have just happened, and partly because of the way they are structured (most recent postings first, making it easy to ignore everything you wrote before), are a transient medium. Rarely is a blog post treated as permanent. We write, then we forget.

The problem, I conclude, is that amidst all the writing, and despite the power of tagging

Blog posts, left to themselves, tend to have a short shelf life.

Briton Nigel Cannings thinks he has the solution to this: automatic tagging. He sees value in all those old blog posts of mine (he may be the only one) and reckons all that old content out there is a repository of wisdom that just needs to be sorted out better. Tagging it ourselves, he thinks, just isn't enough because we don't always see what we've written in a broader context. "Manual tagging is the first step" to sorting and storing blogs and other online content better, he says, "but it still relies upon people understanding themselves, whatever they've already written about, and how their content fits in with other people's content."

More at Loose Wire - WSJ.com.

Technorati Tags: tagging, jiglu, tags

At Last, a Zoomable World

It’s sometimes hard to get my friends excited about the technology I’m interested in, and that’s often down to the fact that a) the exciting stuff is often a big shift in what that technology can do and b) I’m not good at explaining these things to people, especially in wine bars, for some reason.

Last night, for example, I was trying to get someone excited about the Nokia N95. It’s a good phone, but the thing that most gets me excited is the ability to take good photos (5 megapixel camera) and then immediately upload them to Flickr (or anywhere else) via ShoZu, with a GPS tag attached. I just love that idea because it pulls all these technologies together (camera, phone, GPS, 3.5G connection) and makes something of them:

• it’s seamless. I don’t need to do anything except say yes when a message pops up answering if the photo I just took should be uploaded
• it’s instantaneous. As soon as the photo is uploaded it’s visible on Flickr. Anyone who wants to can see what I just saw.
• it’s physical. Now my photo can be seen in geographical context, or seen on Google Earth, or whatever.

But this is just the start. We're getting closer to a zoomable world, as imagined by the likes of the late Jef Raskin. Images will become the way we transfer, navigate and access all sorts of data: it's often easier to navigate through thumbnails than it is through filenames. Think Google Earth using 3Dconnexion's SpaceNavigator but applied to information. The closest I think we have at the moment is TopicScape. For a sign of what this might look like, check out Microsoft's photo-based acquisition, SeaDragon, which will make viewing everything, from maps to newspapers, something that we can do on more or less any device. (See Long Zheng's blog post for a demo at TED, and tools like Widsets for pushing the boundaries of what can be viewed on a small screen.)

The other big change coming that appears in the demo above is that this data will become more meaningful as it's incorporated into bigger arrangements of data. Instead of us just uploading and tagging/geotagging photos, those photos will help make up 3D maps of the world-- check out the BBC/Photosynth gallery in Long's excellent post on this. Imagine that tied to Google Earth-type environments, and then imagine it time-tagged as well as geo-tagged, and you can see the possibilities. Suddenly every photo we take will fit somewhere into a greater mosaic:

This is why I think people should buy phones like the N95, because I think these tools -- camera, phone, fast connection, GPS, editing features -- are going to make ordinary folk much more excited about the content-creating revolution that started with blogs.  

Technorati Tags: gps, nokia, n95, microsoft, seadragon, photosynth, zoomable interface, zui, photos, flickr, google, google earth, geotagging, tagging

A Directory of Tagging Software

I've long felt that tagging is the unsung story for Web 2.0. Sure it's abused, but it's one of the best ways to "move beyond Google" as a way of finding stuff. If everyone tagged what they found on the net, we could all find stuff so much more easily. Actually, come to think of it, that would be a nightmare, since then we'd need a search engine to sift through all the tags. But in general, the idea is a good one: if you've ever looked for a range of sites on Google and been confronted by a mess, checking your keyword on out something like del.icio.us gives you some idea of the power of tags.

But the question I have been trying to ask myself then is: what software lets you use tagging in a non-social environment -- an anti-social environment, if you will? Tagging, it seems to me, is just as powerful for sorting and accessing one's personal information. Why hasn't more standalone software got tags built in? (And to be simple, I've excluded anything that is more like a category, in that it's either a fiddle to add or else only allows assigning one category.)

So here's the beginnings of a list. As usual, I'd love to hear more. And this is very Windows biased. Sorry about that.

• Taglocity allows you to tag your content from within Microsoft Outlook. Tagging helps you find things more easily, organize a lot of information and to communicate more clearly to others - all without complex rules or a new way of working. Tagclouds? Yup.
• MyInfo a personal-reference information manager. MyInfo is a complete solution for collecting, organizing, editing, storing, and retrieving personal-reference information. You can search and list entries in the usual tree form, or via tags. Tagclouds? Yup.
• TiddlyWiki like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole.
• Email: ThunderBird 2.0 supports tagging, although it's a bit basic. TheBat! does a more comprehensive job, turning tags into virtual folders, a bit like GMail's labels.
• Photos: Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Album both support tagging. But be warned. Photoshop Album is, er, no longer available. Instead you're nudged towards the $90 Photoshop Elements.
• EverNote: still one step too many for me, but version 2.0 makes it easier to assign categories to items. And they've changed the icon from a stamp to a tag, so I'm guessing they're getting it.

Some notes

Windows XP tagging

You can add tags to files in Windows XP by the following, according to the company:

Right now in Windows XP, the best way to tag and annotate files is to right-click on the file, select “Properties,” select the “Summary” tab and then insert the metadata (tags) you want to associate with that file. The basic categories are Title, Subject, Author, Category, Keywords and Comments. An additional click on the “Advanced” button in the Summary section provides a few additional categories. For photos though, Digital Image Pro today enables users to add meaningful keywords to your pictures so that you can view them in lots of different ways. Those keywords are applied directly to your photos and so when you put them on a Windows Vista PC in the future, you can immediately take advantage of the built in organization capabilities of the system.

Windows Vista tagging

we have made dramatic changes and improvements to the ways in which the operating system uses that metadata. For instance, all Windows Vista Explorers will include a Preview Pane that displays the metadata associated with the file the user has selected. With the Preview pane, you no longer have to right-click a file to open the Properties dialog box. Instead, a rich set of file properties (metadata) are always visible in the preview pane. You can also add or edit properties easily, for one or many files by selecting the “edit properties” option also found in the pane. Each Explorer also includes an Instant Search field, which immediately searches file names, file properties -- including any metadata added by the user -- and text within each file, and returns results instantly. Users can also save their customized searches as “Search Folders;” a Search Folder re-runs a created search anytime you click on it showing you the latest results. That way you no longer have to worry about where you put your documents and email as your Search Folder instantly looks across your PC and automatically finds them for you.
Users also have the option of following essentially the same steps as in Windows XP to add metadata to their files. The “Summary” tab is called “Details,” and one change that has been made is that all of a file’s properties (metadata) are included in this view in a scrolling menu, so the extra click to get to advanced properties is no longer necessary. However, with Windows Vista, users can select multiple files, right click, follow the same steps, and the metadata is added to all of the files selected. This makes it much easier for users to add metadata and saves them time.

Technorati tags: tagging, tags, search, labels, categories

Some Tools for the Productive

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm a big fan of tools that help sort through your stuff, or at least help you keep it orderly. TiddlyWiki is one of them, but it's often just sat on the wrong side of the line in terms of easily getting stuff into it while you're doing something else. You know the situation: You're browsing, you like the look of something and you want to put it somewhere you can find it again, but you don't really want to start moving around into other programs. TiddlySnip, in this case, might provide the answer:

TiddlySnip is a Firefox extension that lets you use your TiddlyWiki as a scrapbook! Simply select text, right click and choose 'TiddlySnip selection'. Next time you open your TiddlyWiki file, your snippets will be there, already tagged and organised.

It works well. On the same subject, I've heard from the PR folks involved with EverNote, the scrolling toilet roll of stuff that works not unlike TiddlyWiki, but now, in its 2.0 beta,

allows users to search for text within images—the first time such a product is available to the public.

What this means, apparently, is that you can search images for embedded typed or handwritten text. There's also a portable version of EverNote that you can put on your USB thumbdrive. Both versions might be worth checking out.

Technorati tags: evernote, tiddlywiki, gtd, software, productivity, image search, usb, thumb drives, key drives, portable software, firefox, plugins, extension

What Probably Won't Happen in 2007

The BBC has asked me to make some predictions about the coming year, something I'm always loath to do because I seem to get it wrong. Anyway, here are my notes. They're based in part on my own bath-time musings, and partly inspired by the thoughts of others (tried to credit them where relevant.)

1999 just took longer than we thought, that's all

Web 2.0 is not just about AJAX, mashups, blogs and all that. It's about building a platform. That's now been done. All we need to do now is let people use it. That is already happening, but it will REALLY happen in 2007:

Delivery will get better

RSS will stop being something we have to keep explaining to people, because they'll be using it. It will be seamless -- a way for anyone to join something, whether it's a newsletter, a service, a MySpace group. It will stop being known as Rich Site Syndication or Really Simple Syndication and be Really Simple, Stupid.

Content will get better

The real improvement in computers will be the rise of the dual- and four-core processor, i.e. one that uses more than one chip. Think of it as the computer having more than one brain. This will speed up, and make easier, the editing of video and other multimedia content. Our computer, in a word, will no longer be an expensive typewriter. With faster connection speeds, too, video will be the thing that really makes the Internet compelling to people who were previously uninterested. What we watch on YouTube will get better. Individuals will have their 15 megabytes of fame. But this will couple with a rise of content generated specifically for the Internet, further blurring the lines between TV and computer viewing. Silicon Valley is no longer a tech center, but a media one.

The demise of big software

The rise of online applications will in turn blur the distinction between what is going on in your computer and what is going on at the other end of the line -- the server. Vista will seem more like a farewell than a big hello, as big software from big companies locking in users to specific ways of doing things will give way to open source alternatives like Ubuntu. Microsoft will fight this tooth and nail, but I'm sure they already know it.

The mainstreaming of social media

 Web 2.0 is really all about breaking down barriers by making it easier to do stuff, and to mix it up with other people doing stuff. In a way what the Internet has always been about. Expect the influence of blogs to further pervade those last few citadels that have been resisting it, breaking down walls within organizations -- internal blogs that flatten hierarchies and build up feedback mechanisms for employees to talk back to their bosses. Think government departments. Think universities, schools and anywhere else where hierarchies exist. This won't be a one way street: anonymous bloggers in places like Microsoft and China may find themselves outed and lynched.

The rise of the maven

As the Web gets bigger, Google will need to reinvent itself to keep up. Web 2.0 offers some great ways to find stuff through other means, leveraging the knowledge of others who have gone before. We will acknowledge the contribution, and marketers will acknowledge the power, of the maven: the person who seems to somehow know stuff, and is ready to share it. Tagging, blogging, and other social tools will be recognized as extremely powerful ways to do this.

The demise of the big computer

The cellphone will get better at what it does, and we'll grow to trust it more. We'll stop calling it a cellphone and just call it a wearable device, or something snazzier I can't think of right now. One day we'll think it quaint that we had to sit in one place to do stuff, or near an outlet, or within range of a WiFi signal. Cellphones don't have those limitations and this will start to hit home in 2007:

Teenagers will show us the way. Again

They're already sharing everything via Bluetooth, creating networks on the fly (that, incidentally, fly under the radars of commercial networks and marketers). They share videos, ringtones, songs, games, either by exchanging content or playing against each other.

Space-shifting

The cellphone has already redefined what space is, and that will continue. Sexual liaisons involving public figures will be recorded by one party as insurance against future hard times. Cellphone television will become more popular, not just because it's mobile but because it's personal, a time to be alone under the sheets, on a bus, waiting for a friend, stuck in traffic. Maybe not this year, but soon they'll be pluggable into the hotel TV. This is tied into the idea of personal space being something you control, either through presence, or through intermediary services where you only ever hand out personal details of your virtual self.

The End of the iPod

The iPod will decline in importance as the music-phone takes center stage. I didn't think this would happen because cellphone manufacturers mess up the software on the phone, but they're getting better at it. Even Nokia. So expect most people, starting with teenagers who don't want more than one gadget and probably can't afford them, to switch to one device. This will again throw open the mobile music/MP3/DRM debate, and iTunes will start to look a bit wobbly until Apple gets something sorted out so non-iPod users can download from the site easily and cheaply.

The downsides

It's not all fun and games. Bad things are going to continue to happen, and there's not much we can do about them. It's partly just the normal process of utopians being pushed aside by realists, but it's also about an ongoing debate about how to, or whether to, police a space that seems largely unpoliceable.

A dual identity crisis

Mainstream media's identity crisis will be compounded by an identity crisis among bloggers. The rise of pay-me blogging, where bloggers get paid for writing about specific companies or products, will lead to some scandals and make people explore more deeply the ethics of blogging, and how they're not that much different to the ethics developed by journalists over several hundred years. This won't however, lead to the demise of blogging, but the rise of a sort of online press corps, with its own associations and rules, both written and unwritten. Many bloggers will end up being journalists, and the best journalists will move effortlessly and happily through the blogosphere. Many already do.

Keep up, grandma

Things are moving so fast the slow will look like they're running backwards. If 2004-6 were anything to go by, 2007 will move quite quickly. Some folk I spoke to said that not much has popped up this year that's exciting, and that's true, in a boiling frog type way. It's the earth shifting that is changing, and we need to change with it. Young people just get it, but us digital immigrants need to not just learn the lingo but keep up with the fast-changing slang. Oh, and MySpace won't be the place to hang out in 2007; it'll begin to look like a sad school hall dance arranged by the teachers.

The Rise of the Snoop

We tend to make a distinction between these things, but they're actually all part of the same thing. Spam is getting worse, and it's not just an invasion of privacy but an invasion of our productivity (91% of email is spam.) Music and video files will also rise as vectors of trojans, malware and other PUPs. GPS devices married to phones will enable people to track their employees, spouses or offspring, and further empower stalkers. Cellphone monitoring devices like FlexiSpy will get better at distributing themselves, and will be powerful not just in the hands of eavesdropping acquaintances but identity thieves. The rise of virtual worlds will also lead to the rise of virtual identities and virtual identity theft, along the lines of CopyBot. Expect to see cellphone eavesdropping and data theft from cellphones to surge. And we'll start to realize that Google isn't as cuddly as it looks; it's a snoop, too.

Getting on the Social Trail

More reports of social annotation tools — services that allow you to not just bookmark sites but share those bookmarks, and other bits and pieces with them. This one from the highly readable Read/Write Web, just down the road from me in NZ:

There are a plethora of bookmarking sites out there and only a few of them have become very successful - del.icio.us and Stumbleupon are two that spring to mind. Trailfire is a bit different from your average bookmarking site, because they don't just allow you to share bookmarks - they make it easy for you to share 'trails', which are "annotated navigation paths".

I haven’t had a chance to try out trailfire, and I’m not quite sure how well it works, mainly because it won’t load (it’s been telling me to stand by for nearly 15 minutes now, which is as Bob Geldof would say, a quarter of an hour too long. It has, however, been added to my directory of such tools, which is looking quite big now.

What Goes Around...

I'm belatedly playing with Microsoft's new Windows Live Writer. I like it, but then I've always been a fan of blog writing tools. Here's a list of them I started keeping, although I'm pretty sure it's out of date by now.

But does it not strike you as somewhat strange that we've gotten to this point? I mean, those blog writing tools were available nearly three years ago, doing pretty much what Windows Live Writer does now -- WYSIWYG authoring, HTML source code editing, Web preview mode, adding photos, compatibility with different blog services, some weird formatting and error messages, etc etc. In fact the only thing it's got the others don't have, map publishing, doesn't yet work. Oh, it's free. But otherwise Dmitry Chestnykh of BlogJet seems to have a point when he claims Microsoft has ripped off his software.

So is this where Web 2.0 has taken us? All the way back to a small software tool that lets us write our blog postings offline so we can upload them later?

Netscape Diggs In and Elbows Out the Competition

AOL/Netscape has launched a beta of its new homepage that looks uncannily like Digg, a hugely popular site for techies to publish stuff and have their stories sorted by popularity. Actually it not only looks like Digg, two of the top three stories are Digg's. AOL's been smart tho: visit the source page and you can only do so within a big black sidebar that keeps you wedged inside the Netscape site. (You can't resize it, but you can turn it off, but obviously by default. Meaning it will open with every external link you click on. Oh, and it's really slow to load.)

Perhaps by coincidence, or by the efforts of a few Diggers, those two Digg stories are less than complimentary about AOL: The first, AOL Copies Digg ("Check out what this is based on") and the second  Trying to cancel AOL ("Here's a recording I did of a conversation between myself and AOL while trying to cancel an account I no longer needed. It was old, and I hadn't used it in a REALLY long time, I just never got around to cancelling it. Enjoy!")

A piece by Reuters says that this new site has "editors, which Netscape calls anchors," who "can choose to highlight what they consider important stories." This might be the top portion of the page, but I assume the anchors are not highlighting the two stories mentioned above. Or maybe they are, in some wild new form of self-flagellating transparency?

I won't get into the journalistic implications of all this here. But there's a telling comment by Netscape.com's new general manager, dot-com news entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, to the Reuters reporter: "We don't have to do a level of journalism that you guys do," he said, referring to traditional news organizations. "You guys take it 90 yards, we take it the next 10."

The reporter didn't pick up on this. But when sites like this basically suck content from other sites, from NYT to Digg to Reuters, to form the basis of their homepage, and then link to that content within a sidebar that squeezes the original website partly out of view and off the screen plaster, that 10 yards looks mighty cheap for the yardage you get. Whose content is it now? Who's making money off whom? And who is the smartest person in the room?

technorati tags:digg, netscape, aol, media, news

Boingling Along

Another social annotation tool, this time called Boingle, put together by Greg Martin, who writes:

Boingle is a stripped down social annotation system that lets you annotate within web pages with the result being a simple markup ("Boingles (2)") that looks as though it belongs in the page, much as a link titled "Comments (4)" looks normal within a blog. It is very understated in nature, and lets the annotation content itself be the star.

Social annotation, in case you've not done it, is a method to leave comments (annotations) on web pages so others can see them when they visit. It's mildly popular, though of course only starts working when a critical mass develops of people using the same tool.

Boingle is a toolbar for Firefox and IE, allowing you to add comments (Boingles) by selecting portions of a webpage and then typing in comments (no need for an account; just enter your name, or anyone else's).

I agree Boingle is understated, which is good, but not being able to see what the comments are on the actual web-page reduces its effectiveness, I suspect. Clicking on the 'Boingles (2)' link will open another browser window, which surfers may feel is one browser window more than they need. The other problem, I suspect is that perhaps the 'Boingles' links are too understated, sometimes not really being visible to anyone who isn't looking hard for them.

I think I'd rather see the Boingles appear either as a pop-up or in the browser sidebar. But there might be sound reasons why that may not work.Anyway, great to see people exploring this avenue again.

List of all the social annotation tools I can find here. Please let me know of more I've missed.

technorati tags:social_annotation