CloudNotes

Is Delicious for saving? Or for sharing? Or both?

2009-08-04T19:25:00.001-05:00

Today, Delicious released a pretty hefty set of features, and it’s a good occasion to talk about a couple of issues related to what this blog is about. First, as I mentioned in my last post, I feel like I can post more frequently and with more relevance over at my CloudNotes group on FriendFeed. The group provides an easy way for me to share a few of the many posts and blogs that are already covering the Delicious update more ably and quickly than I could.

A story about a major site’s significant update is going to be covered by every major blog outlet in the tech-o chamber, and each of them will have a slightly different take. Why not keep track with a few of them in FriendFeed? Certainly no need to duplicate the story with my own blog post. But I can still add my own commentary if I want. It’s the best of both worlds.

That being said, I do want to emphasize one thing the Read / Write post mentioned:

We've long believed that Delicious is one of the most under-appreciated social media services remaining from the early days of the social web. This new version could help win back some of the early love, but it does represent a radical shift away from the original vision most people have of the service as a tool for bookmarking things you want to return to later. The founder of Delicious, Joshua Schacter, said on Twitter last night "i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal."

If I were writing my own blog post (and I guess, really, I am) that’s pretty much the story I would tell. Indeed, my post last year contrasting Delicious and FriendFeed, says something eerily similar:

I think people undervalue what's so great about del.icio.us. Better than any other Web site, Del.icio.us (along with its Firefox add-on) functions beautifully as a personal, extremely useful map of the Web. I wonder whether the tech-o chamber tends to overvalue social media and undervalue important, foundational functions, such as information collection and quick reference. It's worth asking the question: could FriendFeed do what Del.icio.us does? My answer is no.

I suppose some people might want to use Delicious primarily as a sharing vehicle. But not me. If I want something in my Twitter feed, I’ll usually post with Bit.ly. Twitter is for conversation. It’s ephemeral. I certainly don’t use it for things I’m planning on saving for later. For more permanent reference I use Delicious and Evernote.

So why is Delicious trying to partake of Twitter’s conversational, real time paradigm if it’s ultimately contradictory? Maybe Techcrunch’s analysis provides a clue. Their criticism both today and a few weeks ago pushes Delicious in two directions. Arrington and Siegler can’t seem to decide whether to criticize Delicious for adding features too slowly or attack it for being too complicated. So they do both. And maybe there’s some method to their madness.

Techcrunch is a pretty good proxy for the market, and today’s marketplace has declared real-time search and conversation to be sexy-land. Saving stuff for later is boring-ville. Delicious thinks it can be both your mistress and your wife. And given its scale (still unmatched by any other bookmarking service), maybe it can. As I’ve already said, Delicious is better than anyone when it comes to creating a social map of the internet’s past. What if they could bring you the present, too?

Join the new CloudNotes group on FriendFeed

2009-07-18T13:15:00.001-05:00

Join up now! Then read on for more details if you wish…

If you’re a reader or subscriber to this blog, you know I don’t post more than once a month—if that much. CloudNotes is really not intended to be a news source or conventional watering hole. From the beginning, I’ve conceived of this forum as more of a personal tech-quest; an exploration of how I personally use web-based notetaking and bookmarking services. My posts tend to be infrequent but longer, and I try to be as partial as possible. You’re getting my opinions—there’s nothing journalistic about what I’m trying to do here.

But also, from the beginning I’ve wished for an in-between way to share casual thoughts and links during those long droughts between posts. A place where I could quickly stash links and bits of news that might not ever merit a full post. This, of course, isn’t so different from note-taking. And at first, I simply shared my Google Notebook. When Google announced they would cease further development of the project, I switched my link blog over to Tumblr, which is perhaps the most elegant and easy blogging platform available.

But a blog isn’t quite what I wanted. Nor does a shared notebook quite meet all my needs (although I do maintain a public Evernote notebook, here). I wanted something interactive. A place where I could post my links, but where others could post their thoughts as well. I think there are people who care about the same web-apps and services I care about. People who require powerful research tools for both work and play. I wanted a place where like minds could share tips and tricks and ideas about notemarking.

Admittedly, I could have invited users to contribute to my Tumblr, but I don’t want co-authors. I want full-on exchanges in a place where everyone’s on equal footing. After abortive attempts at using disappointing services like Social Median and Twine, I’ve finally figured out that FriendFeed is perfect for this. Why is FF so great at community building? As I said on my final Notemarks post:

I want a simpler way to share things, and it doesn’t get simpler or easier than FriendFeed.
I want more interaction with people who care about Notetaking and Bookmarking services. I want to make conversation easier. And FriendFeed does conversation better than anyone.
It should be easy for you to submit your own links and stories. You know I don’t blog all that often, but I’d still like to see daily conversation about how we’re keeping track of your thoughts in the cloud.
I really need an excuse to use FriendFeed. It’s a brilliant service, but very few of my pals are here. This group is a great opportunity to make some new friends who care about a fairly narrow tech subject.

Sure there are already rooms devoted to single services like Evernote and Delicious. But I wanted forum where people feel free to talk about any service. In my dream scenario, about 10 percent of my readers will sign up and be active participants. That’s still small enough where it won’t be attractive to spammers. But, really, I’ll take all comers.

That includes you.

Let’s get started.

Win a scanner darkly

2009-07-07T22:43:00.001-05:00

Me: So I saw your Twitter message just now. What the hell is “#evernote_scansnap”?

Eve666: Oh, it’s so awesome. You know that thing where, like, companies were giving away free Macbooks and iPhones on Twitter if you add their hashtag to your posts?

Me: Yeah, I guess. So this is like #moonfruit and #squarespace?

Eve666: Yeah, well, Evernote is doing the same thing, except they’re giving away this bad-ass scanner. All you have to do is tweet publicly to @evernote with the hashtag #evernote_scansnap somewhere in your message.

Me: hmmmm

Eve666: But it’s kinda dumb too, because unlike the other ones, where you could put those tags in all your tweets and have lots of chances to win, Evernote is limiting entries to only one per week.

Me: I see. So you’re kinda bummed because Evernote is taking a quasi-ethical approach to the whole “co-opt your twitter feed” thing.

Eve666: ..

Me: I mean you’re upset because you won’t be able to spam your friends with bizarre promotional hashtags quite as often as before.

Eve666: This is NOT spam.

Me: So you’ve asked all your friends, and this is what they expected when they agreed to follow all your updates?

Eve666: What is your deal? It’s just a few characters. And in exchange I get a freaking sweet scanner.

Me: No. You get a chance at winning a free scanner.

Eve666: ..

Me: And the chances of you winning go down the more douchebags there are who think spamming their friends with ads is a good idea.

Eve666: (away)

Techcrunch: Ditch Delicious for some dude’s side project

2009-07-06T22:32:00.001-05:00

Today Mike Arrington is suggesting to his readers that they should ditch Delicious and use Pinboard, a private beta “side project” developed by former Yahoo Brickhouse engineer. What’s so great about this new product? It basically recreates the Delicious bookmarklet, adding a nice “Read Later” button to the standard layout:

It looks like Delicious. Only without the help of suggested tags added and curated by a large community of users. Uh, no thanks. I think I’d rather use Delicious. What’s really weird is that Arrington doesn’t offer any evidence there’s anything wrong with Delicious, nor does he offer a convincing argument explaining why Pinboard (or any other service) is any better. Here’s what he does say:

[Delicious is] slow, sometimes offline. A couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t let me log in, saying my password was incorrect. I was sure it was right, but I requested a password reset anyway. The email never came.

The service has languished, and has the feel of a product that’s on life support. There doesn’t seem to be a passionate group of developers loving and caring for the product and making it better over time. Or at least not worse. Traffic is stagnating or dropping, depending on which analytics service you look at. Founder Joshua Schacter left long ago in frustration, and is now at Google.

All Delicious really needs to do is let me bookmark sites without a lot of distraction. It hasn’t been good at that for a long, long while.

Let’s go through this carefully…

“It’s slow.”

For this claim, Arrington offers no evidence other than his own experience. I looked at the Delicious User Forum, and there is indeed a year-old user thread in which Delicious promises to correct a speed issue for IE7 users. As of today, at least one user is stating the problem with IE 7 is still there. From what I can tell in the screenshot, Arrington’s using Firefox. And I’m using the latest version on a Vista machine. The site loads in less than 2 seconds. Consistently.

As an aside, you know what service actually is slow? Twine. That hasn’t stopped Techcrunch from covering it twice in the last three months.

“Sometimes offline.”

I’ve not once noticed Delicious being off-line. And there’s not a current thread on the Forum complaining of the problem.

“A couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t let me log in, saying my password was incorrect. I was sure it was right, but I requested a password reset anyway. The email never came.”

Again, there’s no post to the forum active in the last month from any other user with a similar complaint. There are a few threads of IE 7 users of the Delicious Bookmarks add-on complaining about not being able to stay logged in. That does suck, and Delicious seems to be working on it, but at some point people really need to stop using IE.

“The service has languished, and has the feel of a product that’s on life support. There doesn’t seem to be a passionate group of developers loving and caring for the product and making it better over time. Or at least not worse.”

First, it’s obvious Arrington hasn’t bothered to visit the Delicious support site or the separate site for the Delicious Bookmarks add-on. There, he would see developers who are active every day in response to user questions and concerns. Many problems, such as their hiccup last December are related to interactions with other third-party add-ons. Dealing with issues that can have so many causes isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but Delicious is trying hard every day to help their users.

I do agree that Delicious could be adding features at a faster clip, but I can’t think of any features I’d absolutely have to have. And neither can Arrington. In fact, he doesn’t want any “bells and whistles.” He says that Pinboard is exactly what he wants because it’s got “No graphics. no design. just easy, easy bookmarking and tagging. I love it.”

So which is it? Do you want a site with passionate developers and bug-fixers or a site with one developer who’s created a barebones side project? There’s no coherence in this post. At all.

“Traffic is stagnating or dropping, depending on which analytics service you look at. Founder Joshua Schacter left long ago in frustration, and is now at Google.”

I too was troubled by the departure of Joshua Schacter, but I really liked the Delicious 2.0 release that came after he left, especially the ability to bulk-edit my bookmarks. I’ve been a happy user for several months, and I’ve not seen one service that does it better.

I suppose they may be losing users, which should concern those of us who love the service and want to keep it around. But for now, I’m not going to abandon something that continues to work in a speedy and reliable fashion. I’m certainly not leaving Delicious for a tiny site that’s still in private beta. Again, there’s no coherence here.

All Delicious really needs to do is let me bookmark sites without a lot of distraction. It hasn’t been good at that for a long, long while.

I’ll just say that I’m not buying it. Delicious is working awesome for me. No one else is reporting the problems Arrington is claiming, and I can’t figure out what distractions he’s talking about. Note that he’s still got his beloved Firefox add-on installed. And if you operate it in classic mode, it’s freaking identical to what he likes about Pinboard.

_________

Whew. So none of this is to say that Delicious is perfect or that Pinboard isn’t a worthy project (I’m not a user, but I’m impressed by their listed features). I’m just taking a bit of time to fisk one of Arrington’s lazy posts. I started to write a comment over at Techcrunch, but this post is too long, and the comments there are only slightly better than YouTube quality.

I’ll be back in another month. :)

Why Google Reader is still hugely important (to me)

2009-06-03T22:35:00.001-05:00

I read Steve Gillmor’s elegiac goodbye to RSS a month ago, around the same time I read Farhad Manjoo’s exhortation to “kill your RSS reader” and in that month I’ve asked myself a few times “Could Twitter or Friendfeed completely replace Google Reader in my daily webbernetting? Could I do without my RSS reader altogether?”

This has been roundly debated all over the place, including tech blogs much larger and more well respected than mine. And if you’re reading this blog, I trust you’ve already digested the more popular commentaries. But I’m going to come at it somewhat differently.

Why I prefer Google Reader

Imagine, for a moment, there are sites out there that aren’t tech blogs or news aggregators like Techmeme. News sources that can’t be easily read using Twitter and Friendfeed. News sources and blogs that talk about medicine and law and parenting and music.

As a healthcare lawyer, musician, and soon-to-be dad, that’s the world I live in. And RSS still matters to me. Briefly, here’s why I still prefer Google Reader over Twitter, Friendfeed, and all the other real-time web engines.

Real time doesn’t matter to me. I’m a lawyer who works at a hospital. I’m not a pro-blogger or journalist. I don’t have time to sit around reading FriendFeed and Twitter all day. I check in on my pals, sure. But any just-for-fun reading I do has to occur at lunch and in the evenings. When I’m not doing my freaking job. If I used real-time sources like Twitter or Friendfeed to read the news, much of what I want to read would simply pass me by.
But speed does. And with Google Reader, I usually don’t have to click links to see what I’m reading. It’s already there. And if I want to share a post with friends, it’s a single click or SHIFT-S away.
I care about more than just the tech-o-chamber. If I were a tech journalist / blogger, I’d find just about all the sources I could ever want or need via Twitter / Friendfeed. But for other areas, like law and music and healthcare, the coverage on Twitter and Friendfeed is not cast nearly so wide. There are some enthusiastic users in all those fields using real-time tools and social media, but there are a lot of influential bloggers and news sources who are still pretty old school. They have RSS feeds, but that’s it.
I need deep—not wide—commentary. Much of what I consume is long form, niche material. I read longer posts on blogs that are updated far less frequently. These same blogs are not widely read, so they also aren’t widely shared. I’d miss these posts if it wasn’t for Google Reader.
There’s less noise in my RSS feed. There’s no @replies. There’s no “I need to pee.” There’s no links to Perez Hilton. When I finally take time to read my stuff, I want to read MY STUFF. There’s a place in my workflow for conversation and sharing with friends. And I actually like some of what Google Reader has done with respect to sharing and commenting. But when I’m in Google Reader, my focus is usually more narrow.
My RSS reader offers a more feature-rich, versatile, and efficient experience. I can do lots of things with Google Reader that I can’t do with Friendfeed or Twitter. Or at least, couldn’t do as easily. This is because Google Reader is about much more than reading. It’s an inbox with multiple outputs that serve multiple purposes. Yes, Friendfeed is great for sharing. So is Facebook. But I also use the Web for research and plain ole private reading for personal edification. That’s where Google Reader shines: reading and keeping track of what I’ve read.

This last point is important. I like Twitter. I like Friendfeed. But they’re a small part of my news-reading work flow. Google Reader’s speed, focus, and rich feature set simply allow me to do more with my news. Here’s a few examples of Google’s flexibility:

Tagging and Saving

Google Reader saves everything, so it’s easy to go back and search for something I’ve read in the past. I usually get lightning fast results with Google-like accuracy. That’s better than Twitter, isn’t it?

But suppose I want to make things easier to find? I can just tag them and come back to the collection. I’m fond of keeping track of cool desktop apps I’ve read about at Lifehacker or Download Squad. So, I usually tag these posts with “apps” and review them when I’ve got some free time. I don’t need all my friends reading these posts, it’s just for my use and later enjoyment. So when I’m ready to review my “Apps” posts, I click “Trends” then scroll down to my tag cloud.

Publishing and Sharing

Google Reader allows you to create link blogs for all your shared or starred items, both of which can be made public. And, it’s easy to publish. Just click the share or star buttons. If you want, you can import your shared items into Friendfeed or Facebook. It is faster and more effortless than re-tweeting. And you can reach a larger audience with minimal setup.

I take this concept a step further by using some items as inputs into my Tumblr blogs. If you read my Cloudnotes companion, Notemarks, you might have already noticed this. To publish an excerpt on Tumblr, all I have to do is tag an item, and then import the shared RSS feed for that tag into Tumblr. I use the tag “cloudnotes” to designate an item for publication on Notemarks.

Taking notes

I write a weekly post for a music blog, and all week I take notes and do research for that one post, which is usually kinda long. Google Reader is only one of several sources for that research material, but it’s an important tool nonetheless. To make sure I get all my music links together, I like to keep stuff in Evernote (I finally converted!).

So how do I get Google Reader posts into Evernote? I use the email feature. Evernote supports email importing, so it’s a pretty simple process.

I just address it to Evernote, and it shows up for later organization with all my related notes from other sources. Plus, I usually send a copy to myself, so it’s also available in my Gmail. Since I tend to use “Send to Gmail” as my all-purpose bookmarklet (works with any service that imports email), Gmail is a pretty handy backup for all my notes.

Reading it later

Finally, sometimes I just want to mark an article for later reading, nothing more and nothing less. For that I use the outstanding Read It Later add on for Firefox. Sure, it works everywhere in your browser or on your iPhone, but I absolutely LOVE its Google Reader integration.

That friendly red check mark just says, “I’m coming back to this later today or this week when I have time.” Since I usually only have time for light reading at lunch, this this little tool is a godsend for helping me read longer, more involved pieces.

So that’s it.

I use Google Reader because it’s flexible enough to encompass everything I need to do when I’m consuming content online. And I can do quite a bit with keyboard shortcuts and single-clicks. Let me know when Twitter and Friendfeed are that flexible.

Ten Steps Evernote Can Take Toward Perfection

2009-04-22T23:32:00.001-05:00

After Google announced the demise of their awesome Notebook product, I was pretty bummed. In the aftermath, I looked at a few other tools, but I’ve mostly been using Evernote. I haven’t been totally happy about it, though. As I said my earlier post reviewing Evernote’s Google Import utility:

Overall, I think Evernote has done a nice job … and it’s definitely a strong contender to replace Google Notebook as my app of choice. Next week, I’ll let you know why I’m withholding my full endorsement.

As you’ve probably noticed, I still haven’t followed up. Frankly, I forgot I was supposed to get back to my readers. A couple weeks ago, a commenter named Larry reminded me of my outstanding obligation.

So here it is, 3 months later, and I’m about to tell you how I think Evernote could improve on what I must admit is the leading notebook product available. Where possible, I’ve linked to other folks articulating similar complaints.

Major issues

Keyboard shortcuts in the Web version. I find the Web version of Evernote nearly unusable, thanks to a near complete lack of support for keyboard shortcuts. I can’t bold or underline. Can’t create bulleted or numbered lists. And you can’t cycle forward and backward through your notes. As a Google Reader / Gmail user, I know perfection in this regard is possible. But in Evernote Web, just about everything has to be done by clicking on a damn menu button. This is item number one for a reason.
Shared notebooks need an overhaul. In the sidebar, I used to link my readers to a shared page in Google Notebook. That’s not really possible in Evernote, because the shared notebooks look like ass. They need to ditch the framed navigation and make each shared notebook look more like a blog, and less like Evernote. You can tell there’s an ambition to make their notebooks more like blogs, because there’s a permalink button and tags right up there with the title and link. But the framed navigation and lack of a tag cloud kills the natural inclination to browse. And, of course, there are no comments. Which is kind of inexcusable given the lack of more advanced collaboration features. I should say I don’t mind the ads, but they’d get a lot more impressions if they made a more readable product. For real, Evernote could make for a killer Tumblelog, but until they get it right, I’m using Tumblr.
Collaboration in shared notebooks. This is a nice-to-have, but it’s something Google Notebook did very well. Because Evernote is a cross-platform behemoth it’s a bit tougher nut to crack, but they could speed it up by enabling collaboration in Web mode only. And make it a premium feature. Now that’s something people would pay for. P.S., I’m aware this is on Evernote’s 2009 to-do list, but it would be silly not to include such a major feature on this list.
Sane tag navigation. Evernote features a fantastic import tool for your Delicious bookmarks, but I’ve avoided it because adding all my Delicious tags to the already crowded sidebar would make things entirely unmanageable. For a small amount of tags, Evernote’s vertical hierarchy of tags makes sense. But once you achieve a critical mass, tags become unusable. You can’t quickly identify or locate your content. I realize tag clouds aren’t universally appreciated, especially in the blog context. But in an app like Evernote conserving screen real estate and minimizing scroll time (in an already scroll-heavy app) becomes very important. Also, the size convention common in tag clouds, in which larger font size indicates greater tag frequency, would allow users to quickly identify their most important content. Tag clouds should at least be an option.

This still isn’t all my tags. Keep scrolling…
Highlighter would be awesome. I’m struggling to think of another notetaking app that doesn’t offer a highlighter. Guess what? Nearly every major Evernote competitor offers a highlighting function. Certainly every app I’ve covered here does. Usually in more than one shade. This feature is also included in Zoho Writer and Google Docs. Ditto Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Not sure what Evernote is thinking here, but if the idea is that it’s an overrated, underused function, just about every other user and developer on earth seems to disagree.

Minor issues

Would a little color kill you? There’s a certain stoic panache to Evernote’s palate of green and gray, but it sure would be helpful to add a little color that helps differentiate content. Gmail is the model here, with options to color code tags/labels. An even better model would be the Gmail labs feature, SuperStars, which itself is similar to the visual tags in OneNote. This could add an additional categorization feature to the already helpful tags and folders. The use of these small, colorful cues would actually enhance the function of apps relatively monochrome color scheme, because the color-marked items would stick out all the more.
Nested folders in notebooks. I realize that under the current Evernote regime, tags are nested. Notebooks are not. This makes very little sense, but it’s not quite the dealbreaker that lack of a tag cloud option is. Still, notebooks are, by definition, designed to house broad categories of information. As you see in OneNote, it’s natural to subdivide these broad categories into tabs (or subnotebooks). Evernote mysteriously avoids this organizing principle in favor of nested tags. I say mysterious, because one of the foundational justifications for tags over folders is that they can apply in a variety of contexts. That is, one tag might belong to several “folders” or ideas. They are atoms, free to combine and recombine according to their different valences and properties. But in Evernote’s bizarro world, the very strengths of tags are neutralized so that you end up with a large clump of useless folder-like tags. Meanwhile, your Notebooks are static and cannot themselves contain sub-units.
Click-less access to edit menu. Both the Web and desktop versions of Evernote force you to 1) Select a note, then 2) click again before you can access the rich text editing menu. In a perfect world, like Google Notebook, you’d only have to click once. Obviously, in the Desktop app, this doesn’t annoy me as much because keyboard shortcuts are available once you’ve selected a note.
One click Web mode. I absolutely love Read It Later, mostly because to save an item for later reading, I only have to click once. No tagging, no confirming. It’s great. The desktop version of Evernote has this feature, and I love it. The Web-based clipper and bookmarklet require an extra step, as you have to confirm your saved item. Evernote could easily create a second bookmarklet, that allowed users to save links using a single click to which they could return.
Additional email options. I recently started using Evernote’s email function so that I could simultaneously save items to Gmail. Unfortunately, when you use Evernote’s email option, there’s no way to indicate which notebook the item should go in or which tag should be applied. For example, it would be nice to add #hashtags to the subject or body of the email and have Evernote automatically read this as a tag or notebook. I saved this for last because Evernote’s saved searches feature can be used to accomplish the same thing: Simply create a saved search for {your hashtag here}. Then, including that text in your email will ensure it shows up in your saved search. Still, Evernote could easily add a syntax parsing feature that allowed you to define notebooks and tags for your emailed items. I would love it because I could then take advantage of Gmail’s highlighter feature in every note I clipped. :p

Well, there you have it. My suggestions for Evernote. Most of them aren’t new or groundbreaking. Indeed, the fact that so many have suggested these changes is a sign of Evernote’s overall strength as an incredible cross-platform notetaking option. Still, there is some frustration because many inferior apps and services already include the above features. These glaring omissions and design errors are sometimes enough to make you forget that Evernote has a peerless mobile app, voice recording, and text recognition in photos.

I look forward to Evernote improving because they responded to many of these ideas within their user forum (many of which are included above as links). Despite what Robert Scoble or Facebook thinks, I believe listening to users is usually a good idea, and I’m glad to see Evernote is listening to people like me.

I like Likaholix. A lot.

2009-03-18T21:33:00.001-05:00

First, four ex-Googlers launched Friendfeed to expand on Facebook’s news feed idea. They ended up creating the gold standard for Lifestreaming services. Now two more former Google employes have launched Likaholix, and it looks a lot like Facebook’s “I’m a Fan” feature. And as with Friendfeed, it’s like Facebook, only better.

Facebook caught a lot of flak for their Beacon feature, but as they’ve refined their brand-interaction strategy, they’ve also proven that users love giving props to the products, services, and entertainers they LIKE. Every week, I notice friends of mine become “fans” of TV shows (e.g., Dexter), Bands (Jesus and Mary Chain), Beers (Lone Star, Shiner), and politicians (Barack Obama).

Likaholix expands on this idea with an entire site devoted to sharing your favorite things, whatever those things might be. As with “fan”-hood on Facebook, you’re broadcasting your affinity for something that isn’t necessarily defined elsewhere on the Web. On Facebook, for example, you can be a fan of Pizza. Or Sleep.

But unlike Facebook, Likaholix doesn’t force you to receive spammy updates from the Page administrator. In fact, you don’t have to wait around for someone else to create a page at all. Instead, Likaholix works more like a traditional bookmarking site. So, let’s say I like Doritos (a fair statement).

Likaholix’s built-in search engine locates several links I can choose to represent the popular site. I’ll choose the obvious one, Doritos.com.

Next, if I want, I can explain why I like Doritos so much, and I can add some topics (i.e., tags). Also, I can search for images and videos I want to associate with my Doritos page.

Now, the delicious snack food has it’s own spot on my Likaholix page, where my pals can watch the videos I chose and comment on my page. The can also piggy-back on my Like, if they share my love for the delicious snack food.

And finally, I can close the loop using either Facebook Connect, sharing my likes with an even wider audience. As you see below, my likes can seamlessly integrate with my Facebook feed.

Those are the basics, but there’s an impressive array of features for such a new product:

Bookmarklet allows you to Like any web page
Link your account with Facebook, Twitter, or Friendfeed
Import reviews from Yelp and Amazon
Bookmark your favorites
View a stream of recommendations based on your Likes
Become a tastemaker in up to two topics of your choosing, and earn a snazzy star for your profile
Subscribe to your friends’ Likes or keep up with your favorite topics (e.g., coffee, video games)

The more you explore these features, the more you come to realize that Likaholix isn’t really like Facebook at all. Instead it bears an uncanny resemblance to Friendfeed. Does this sidebar header seem familiar to you? What about that playful logo? Or the careful cultivation of white space? Yeah, me too. But I’m not knocking it. There’s nothing wrong with clean design and transparent usability.

Likaholix isn’t the only site aiming to stake a claim to Twitter-length microreviews. Blippr (recently acquired by Mashable) comes to mind immediately. But think I prefer Likaholix’s open-ended simplicity. There are no categories except the ones you create. There’s no rating system. And there’s no pressure to write reviews. You just “like” something. That simplicity is what was so great about being a “fan” on Facebook. As I’ve said before, a great bookmarking service should work to reduce friction. How many clicks does it take? The closer you are to 1, the better your service.

That’s not to say Likaholix couldn’t be better. The Facebook Connect integration could work more simply and smoothly. And they definitely need a de-duping / disambigution engine. Right now, anyone can create a Doritos page. So even if it says I’m the “first” to like something, it doesn’t mean there aren’t 8 or 9 other nearly identical pages and conversations going on. Now where have I heard that before?

I actually raised both the above issues with Likaholix co-founder Bindy Reddy. She responded almost immediately and said they were working on both issues. Indeed, since I first emailed her, they’ve already improved the Facebook Connect feature so that you can post likes to either your status or your feed. For a timeline of other features they’re working on, click here. Also, check out their room on Friendfeed.

Shareaholic homepage gets a makeover

2009-03-16T22:09:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite Firefox add-ons has fancied up their landing page quite a bit this evening. It’s a good time for me to tell you how much I rely on this one little extension. Basically, it’s a bookmarklet aggregator that allows you to consolidate some of your most used Web tools into one easy button.

What sites does it support? A lot:*

Sure, you could just collect all your bookmarklets in a single folder on your toolbar (and even sync them using Xmarks), but it wouldn’t be as elegant. Besides, Shareaholic also shows you how many times certain pages have been shared or Dugg, something a normal bookmarklet can’t do.

But as much as I love Shareaholic, I think there’s still some room for improvement:

For starters, there should be a sync feature that ports your preferences across browsers.
In the same vein, why not aggregate all the links you share regardless of the service you use? It could be one garage that tracks all your sharing activity. Of course, you’d need granular privacy settings, but Shareaholic could still collect aggregate data that allowed to amass Web-wide statistics similar to AddThis or Add to Any. This might be a better use for Shareaholic’s sister site, Bzzster.
A killer feature would be the ability to add your own bookmarklet to Shareaholic just by dragging and dropping.
But if they can’t do that, at least add some important missing bookmarklets (e.g., Amazon’s Add to Wishlist, Posterous, and the new and totally awesome Likeaholix).

A while back I submitted a Delicious bug to Shareaholic co-founder Jay Meattle, and he promptly resolved my issue with an experimental build that fixed the problem (the latest version includes that fix). He could not have been nicer. I also shared my Amazon recommendation with him, so hopefully that will be part of the next version. Until then, it’s not leaving my browser anytime soon.

*Note that my current version of the add-on (1.6) doesn’t have support for Evernote and does not include the newly updated Twine bookmarklet. I assume he’ll be adding support for these soon soon.

Digging in the DiRT

2009-02-04T21:35:00.001-06:00

Today, my pal Meg sent me a link to a PBWiki focused solely on digital research tools or (DRT). Meg is an academic librarian and frequent Cloudnotes reader, so when she sent me this link I knew I had to check it out. DiRT’s self-described mission is pretty straightforward:

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

The DiRT home page is helpfully organized around various research activities, including Brainstorm/ generate ideas, Make a screencast, Share bookmarks, Take notes/ annotate resources, and Visualize data. For each task, DiRT provides links to tools, software, and websites that fit the bill. For some of the more well-known research tools, such as Zotero and Diigo, DiRT features a longer review discussing the tool’s advantages and disadvantages.

I’m pretty excited to see a wiki dedicated to online research. And I’m happy to report that, unlike many specialty wikis, DiRT isn’t an abandoned ghost town. While not yet a comprehensive source, it seems to be an active community, with a critical mass of useful content. As a native Texan (I live in Houston), I also have to note DiRT’s editors are predominantly Texas-based, including academic librarians at Rice University and Sam Houston State University.

If you’re at all into the stuff I write about here, a site like this deserves your attention and support. So I encourage you to head over there, take a look around, and maybe become a contributor.

Noscript’s uneasy relationship with bookmarklets

2009-01-26T21:34:00.001-06:00

Whenever I install Firefox for the first time, my first add-on is always the venerable Noscript extension. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Noscript basically enforces a no-javascript zone for all web sites you encounter, except for those you trust (i.e., sites you add to your whitelist). In today’s Web world, nearly every Web site worth visiting uses javascript to implement the whiz-bang functionality and awesomeness we users demand. Unfortunately, not everyone can be trusted to use that power for good. Noscript is your weapon against such unscrupulous programmers.

When I first started using Noscript, I found it was a more efficient and more nuanced pop-up / ad blocker, because I could reliably stuff rogue ad-servers while whitelisting the core site. It also protected me from surreptitious malware agents, which silently utilize javascript to take advantage of browser-based vulnerabilities. Noscript allowed me to surf within a trusted Web, while forcing new sites to earn that trust with good behavior.

One of the minor inconveniences of Noscript has always been the use of bookmarklets. Typically, if you’re trying to bookmark or clip a page using a bookmarklet, you must first whitelist the underlying site. This usually means adding at least one extra click and one page reload before you can save the page. This is annoying, but it’s a reasonable tradeoff, given the enormous security advantages Noscript delivers.

A more recent Noscript / Bookmarklet conflict involves a different Noscript feature: protection against cross-site-scripting attacks or (XSS). This feature is a more sophisticated defense, designed to meet a more complicated foe: hackers that can exploit a loophole in a trusted site, and inject malicious code that can fleece you of your cookies including your stored web mail or bank passwords. These attacks are more insidious than traditional phishing attacks because you can’t prevent them just with anti-phishing smarts. The code is loaded without you knowing. Here’s how Wikipedia introduces the subject:

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications which allow code injection by malicious web users into the web pages viewed by other users. Examples of such code include HTML code and client-side scripts. An exploited cross-site scripting vulnerability can be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy. Vulnerabilities of this kind have been exploited to craft powerful phishing attacks and browser exploits. As of 2007, cross-site scripting carried out on websites were roughly 80% of all documented security vulnerabilities. Often during an attack "everything looks fine" to the end-user who may be subject to unauthorized access, theft of sensitive data, and financial loss.

Obviously, it’s good to have some protection against these attacks. And while Firefox 3 and IE8 offer some protection, Noscript claims to offer a more complete defense. Unfortunately, Noscript’s XSS features can interfere mightily with the function of many otherwise useful bookmarklets. Tim, a Web designer at FastSpot, explains how bookmarklets can be adversely affected by well-meaning XSS defenses:

The great thing about the web is that it’s inter-connected, and even with all the security measures that have been put in place, a great deal of things can still be accomplished with web mash-ups. We’ve done quite a few cool things with Google Maps, eBay, Yahoo, and other web APIs. But we had server access to all the sites we’ve incorporated those cool features on. What if you want to share a cool feature with someone else just by passing them some code to paste into their website, or better yet, simply a bookmark to click?

Bookmarklets are fairly new to the web, but already there are tons of useful ones! Take a gander at X-Ray (a bookmarklet for inspecting elements of a website), Firebug Lite (an awesome debugging tool for Internet Explorer), and even a bookmarklet for downloading videos off of YouTube and other video sites. You simply drag the link to your bookmarks bar or right click to add the bookmark, visit any website, click the bookmark, and cool things happen on the current site you’re at.

So what do bookmarklets have to do with cross site scripting and web security? Well, they’re the most effected feature-wise when it comes to the web paranoia. There is a cross-domain limit on what Javascript can do in browsers while transmitting data. For example, “AJAX” requests can’t be transmitted from Javascript hosted on www.google.com to www.yahoo.com.

Here’s an example of what Tim’s talking about, using a bookmarklet for Microsoft’s Thumbtack web-clipping app.

Clicking the Thumbtack’s bookmarklet gets you a blank slate and an error message:

But you can choose to perform an unsafe reload, and it will work just fine.

Sadly, if you choose to continue using Thumbtack, you’ll have to perform an unsafe reload each time you use the bookmarklet, even if both Thumbtack and the underlying site are whitelisted. If you like doing patently unsafe things over and over again, this option is for you.

There are two other things you can do:

Create an XSS exception. Go to Options >> XSS. You will see three built-in exceptions for Wikipedia, Google, and Yahoo. The syntax is complicated, and for other sites you’ve got to figure it out yourself. I tried making one for Evernote by copying the examples, but I could never get it to work. Evernote’s Bookmarklet would always require an unsafe reload. It’s worth noting that Google Notebook probably never had to worry about Noscript’s XSS filter, due to the already included exception.
Wait until your favorite site can work out its differences with Noscript. In Evernote’s case, this appears to have finally worked. Noscript announced today that the add-on now works with Evernote’s Web Clipper. I have no doubt that Evernote was aware of the conflict and worked closely with Noscript on a behind-the-scenes fix, although I’ve not seen either company mention it.

Evernote welcomes Google Notebook users with import utility

2009-01-22T21:18:00.001-06:00

As promised, Evernote has released an import tool for disappointed Google Notebook users. I’ve just tried it out, and I’m happy to report it works largely as advertised. If you've tried Ubernote’s import tool the process is basically the same: export each of your notebooks in Google’s Atom format, then import those files into Evernote.

Unlike Ubernote’s no-frills import, Evernote actually gives you some options about how you want your notes to look once they’re imported (reminiscent of their impressive Delicious import tool). You can import your notebooks into an existing Evernote notebook or create a new notebook. You can also decide whether you want to include your existing notes, labels, and section headings.

A few times, Evernote got stuck, and I had to re-import, which resulted in some duplicate notes. But, for the most part, it was a smooth process. Once everything was imported, I wanted to see how the same notes were displayed in each service. Let’s take a look:

Here’s a publicly shared note in Google Notebook. Note the secondary comments section in light blue (one of my favorite features.

Now, here’s the same note in my public Evernote Notebook. Notice that the tags are on top, right below the title (red arrow). The comment is preserved and separate from the text of the note, but it’s indented rather than highlighted (blue arrow).

You’ll also notice a couple of severe drawbacks associated with Evernote’s public notebooks when compared with Google. You have to view each note in isolation by clicking on it, and you have to view ads. I prefer Google Notebook’s uncluttered blog-style view, which allows you to scroll and see notes in context with one another.

My only other complaint is that Evernote promises all imported notes “will retain their original creation date.” My imported notes all bore today’s date. It doesn’t bother me all that much, but if chronology is important to you, I recommend waiting until Evernote has corrected that problem.

Overall, I think Evernote has done a nice job with this feature, and it’s definitely a strong contender to replace Google Notebook as my app of choice. Next week, I’ll let you know why I’m withholding my full endorsement.

What I’ll miss about Google Notebook? Speed and Search.

2009-01-21T21:37:00.001-06:00

Digital Inspiration notes that several newly invigorated competitors are tripping over themselves to offer easy-import tools now that Google Notebook has been left for dead. Ubernote, which has some striking UI similarities to Google Notebook, offers a guide to importing Google’s Atom files. Zoho’s solution is even easier, because you don’t have to import your notebooks one at a time. Apparently, Evernote is working on an import solution as well, but it’s not quite ready.

Being able to import your notes into another app is nice, but it’s only possible because Google’s web-based product was so superior in the first place. Of the products mentioned above, only Google Notebook provides multiple sharing and backup options, including both HTML and Atom formats. Evernote does full XML import / export, but you have to install the desktop app on Mac or Windows to take advantage of those functions.

Of course, the option to take your game elsewhere isn’t the only advantage Google Notebook had. As you would expect with a Google Product, Notebook was fast and it was easy to find your stuff. I’m not sure what you look for in a Notebook, but being able to store and find my stuff when I’m in a hurry is about the only thing I demand. To illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s take a look the two competitors now offering import tools.

Ubernote
I’m actually pretty impressed with Ubernote’s expansive list of features, and I love their UI because it borrows so liberally from Google Notebook’s design (it also borrows liberally from Evernote’s name and mascot, but we’ll let that slide for now). Yes, Ubernote offers just about everything Google Notebook offers, but unfortunately, it’s much, much slower. No, I don’t expect Ubernote to match the scale and resources that Google Notebook had, but the load times are a noticeable drag. In my experience, Ubernote’s search function is only slightly slower than Google’s. But page loads and clippings take much longer. “So what,” you say? “So it takes a little longer.” But as Jeff Atwood noted today, even a little lag time can have a huge negative effect on user experience. What I loved about Google was how quickly I could clip text into its Firefox extension and move stuff around, without ever leaving the page. Ubernote’s Firefox add-on and bookmarklet don’t come close in either speed or convenience.

Still, I could actually see myself using Ubernote if they smoothed out the rough edges and sped things up a bit. A recent blog post implied that the hiccups and slow speed might be caused, in part, by their recent growth spurt. They say they’re working on it, and I hope they are. It’s an app with a lot of promise.

Zoho Notebook
Zoho Notebook is not quite so promising. Recall that I care about two things: speed and search. Zoho’s Notebook is plenty responsive, but as I’ve noted before, it gets an “F” in search. Why? Because Zoho offers no help when it comes to finding your stuff. There’s no search box. There are no tags. Ubernote, Google Notebook, Evernote, and Zotero all feature both tags AND search. But apparently Zoho doesn’t think these features are all that important. Actually helping you locate what you’ve stored with them is unnecessary. I know I’ve said this before, but that’s kind of ridiculous. Somehow they managed to copy OneNote’s look and feel while omitting one of the most obvious and crucial functions. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Frankly, I kinda wish these sites rushing to capture Google’s market share were forced to do it the old fashioned way. Not by creating an easy-import tool for a dying product, but by making their products more useful to end users. All I want is to quickly clip notes from the web, and find them equally fast from any internet-connected computer. If you can do that, I don’t care about your import tool. I’ll export all my old notes to Google Docs (another killer option Google Notebook offers). Then I’ll start over with a product aimed at winning both my heart and my notes.

RIP, Google Notebook

2009-01-14T23:52:00.003-06:00

Right now, I’m a little bummed out.
My favorite Notebook app is was Google Notebook. I say was because Google is apparently ending its Notebook experiment. As reported earlier today in Search Engine Land, Google Notebook is one of five casualties in Google’s effort to get leaner and more focused on its core products and mission. Danny Sullivan succinctly noted:

Google Notebook closes, though those with existing accounts can continue to save material. New accounts won’t be allowed, however — nor will the service be further developed, and the Google Notebook Extension for browsers will no longer work. Google told me it makes more sense to close this when it offers other services that allow for notetaking, such as Google SearchWiki, Google Docs and Google Bookmarks.

No doubt, Google needed to consolidate some of its bookmarking efforts, and there clearly wasn’t a critical mass of Notebook users to worry about. But I love Google Notebook, even compared to flashy, feature-rich competitors like Evernote. Google Notebook’s chief advantages were its superb bookmarklet/extension and excellent, no-frills handling of text and links. As I said before, my notes are all about text, and Google Notebook handled basic text and links better than any web-based notebook I’ve used.

Alternatives

Although Google Notebook is technically staying open, I can’t continue to use it without the handy bookmarklet/extension. That was the best feature. So I’m in the market for a decent alternative. The two most obvious options are as follows:

Evernote: I like Evernote a lot. I had almost decided to switch a few weeks back but I ran into a snag when their bookmarklet didn’t work so well with the popular Noscript Firefox add-on. For now, I choose Noscript. But evernote has promised to overhaul their web clipper in the new year, so I’m looking forward to that.
Zotero: In some ways, Zotero is better than either Evernote or Google Notebook, but its relatively strong privacy and superb handling of PDFs make it perfect for my work. And I try not to mix my personal stuff with business stuff. Check out my Zotero review for a good idea of why I like it so much.

So my two favorite Google Notebook alternatives are perhaps out of the question for now. And I absolutely can’t stand Zoho Notebook. That being the case I may try one of several smaller, similarly named notebooks: Ubernote, Springnote, Springpad, or Webnote. Honestly, I’ve tried them all, and found them all lacking. Anyway, I’m don’t think any of these smaller companies will have any better luck than Google did. And without Google’s cash, I’m not too sure I can trust another company to hold onto my data.

Exporting your Google Notebook

Speaking of which, Digital Inspiration already has a great guide to exporting your Google Notebook for use somewhere else. I will probably go the Google Docs route.

One final prediction

As I said earlier, Google probably had to split the baby when it came to Google Notebook and Google Bookmarks. The fact that they decided in favor of Google Bookmarks might seem surprising given how poorly the product stacks up against every other bookmarking service out there (e.g., Delicious, Magnolia, Diigo). But I think focusing their effort on Google Bookmarks is consistent with a few other moves they’ve made in the last year or so:

Integrating bookmarks more closely with Google Toolbar.
Introducing an entirely new browser (which has embryonic bookmarking features).
And recently, hiring Delicious founder Joshua Schachter

Could Google be thinking about expanding Bookmarks into a bona fide Delicious competitor that’s fully integrated into its desktop offerings? I think that would be the most sensible (and compelling) route for Google to take.

Tagging: How to do it and knowing when not to do it

2009-01-04T06:48:00.001-06:00

One of the best innovations in social media is also one of its most pernicious traps: tag creep. Do you have too many tags? Redundant tags? Tags that are similar? Tags that break your own rules for tagging stuff? I know it’s happened to me, in both my blogs and my Delicious collection. But Steve Rubel points me to some great advice from Jason Falls on how to ensure your tags are useful and organized so that YOU can FIND STUFF (that is why you do this, right?).

One of the best tips is also a bit counter-intuitive: don’t bookmark everything.

This one is a hard one for some to grasp, but bear with me. I bookmark fewer and fewer items these days for one simple reason: I subscribe to just about everything I find interesting online via RSS. If I want to find an article I read on Mark Dykeman’s blog a year ago, I can search my RSS feeds and find it. It’s not much more time consuming or difficult than bookmarking it, so I don’t need bookmarking as much anymore. However, there are purposes and reasons for aggregating everything I find on certain subjects, so bookmarking hasn’t lost its relevance. But I only bookmark what I’m going to later need when writing an article on the subject or preparing presentation for clients, etc.

This is the one bit of advice I’ve already been following myself. I use Google Reader as my primary news source, and if I want to go back to an article I’ve read there I simply search my feeds for it (I also use tags within Google Reader, but I use them very sparingly).

But what if there’s something I want to read later? Call me crazy, but I use Read it Later.

So what do I use Delicious for, if not for organizing items I’ve read or saving items for later reading? I use Delicious for reference. Reference doesn’t mean, “I might need this later.” Reference is stronger than that:

I will use this later. More than once.
I will recommend this to friends now. I will want to recommend it to them later as well.
This matches a collection of other items for which I already use a common tag.

The last bullet is related to an idea I would have added to Jason’s outstanding post. Don’t tag everything. Tag an item only when you know how to tag it. Don’t tag it just because you’re saving it. Tags are for items that are thematically or topically related to something else you’ve already saved. Adding a tag means, “I’ve got more than one of these.” If you aren’t sure how to tag something, but you think it needs to be saved, write a good description of the item. A later search of your bookmarks will find it. If you never use that item again, that’s okay. You’ve avoided cluttering your system with a tag that makes you scratch your head.

How to bork your bookmarks, delicious-style.

2008-12-06T09:07:00.001-06:00

Step 1.
Read this post, in which Delicious announces their updated Delicious Bookmarks Firefox add-on. The addon:

has received a major behind-the-scenes change as we moved from using RDF to SQLite for storing the bookmarks. This means that the add-on is faster and more stable, especially for users with large accounts. It has been updated to work with Firefox 3.1 Beta and now works on Firefox 2.0-3.1b1 on Windows, Mac, and most Linux distributions that support Firefox.

Exciting, huh?

Step 2
Install the update, as requested by your Firefox add-ons manager.

As it synced for the first time, I noticed the progress bar was making a lot of progress, but I only had 39 bookmarks (out of 1894). Turns out, after the full update, that was still all I had. 39 bookmarks.

Okay, that’s okay. Let’s try this: Delicious Options—>Advanced—>FULL SYNC.

Yes. That’s what I need. Go little green progress bar, GO!

Uh, wait, what’s this? I now have zero bookmarks. And I’m not the only one.

Look, I love Delicious Bookmarks. And I know they’ll fix this. But this update is only one in a long line of updates to this venerable add-on, all of which were intended to fix some prior grievous error. This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve had a serious problem, so I’ve been a regular reader of both the Delicious Forum and the Yahoo Group for the Delicious Bookmarks Firefox add-on. I am only one of many users who are waiting for the day when everything will just work as advertised and as hoped. Said one poster about this latest update:

Finally a new version that hasn't created more problems than it fixes. Also, thank you for allowing capitalized tags again. I had about given up on it ever being fixed, and was looking into other bookmarking options.

From my end, it appears he spoke too soon. I am aware that Delicious has updated their site to include streaming audio bookmarks, and that is very cool. But I’m necessarily focused on my own little problem right now, and I’m hoping that a fix comes soon. I also hope that the fix doesn’t break something else.

I kid.

Because I love.

Your own private Google

2008-11-20T22:41:00.001-06:00

Earlier this evening, Google unleashed SearchWiki, a feature allowing you to edit and annotate Google search results. The kicker? They’ve added the feature to their flagship product: Google. It’s not in beta. It’s not a lab feature. It’s not part of Google Notebook, and it doesn’t require a Firefox plug-in. As long as you’re signed in under your Google ID, you’ll see it whenever you search for something on Google. This video does a great job explaining the feature, so I won’t bother repeating it.

This is pretty fascinating, and I’ve got a couple of thoughts. First, if you’re the type of person who thinks bookmarking is useless because Google gets you there faster and easier than any other option, well, this announcement bolsters your argument. For example, type in “sports.” ESPN comes up first, but you don’t like that. You’d rather see Fox come up first. Press the arrow to promote Fox to the top. Done.

But what if you want to see Football Outsiders and King Kaufman’s Salon column on this list? Just add them using the “add search result” feature at the bottom of the page. You might rarely use Google for simple, generic keyword searches like “recipes” or “weather”, but with SearchWiki, those same keywords can now be used to map your most visited sites.

The other obvious use is for searches you might regularly perform, but which are frequently updated with new results. A vanity search is a great example.

Come on. It would have been boring if I used my own name.

I’ll be interested to see how often I use SearchWiki. I certainly use Google a lot, but I don’t frequently run the same searches or run into the same results. I’m skeptical as to whether Google’s latest innovation will prove all that useful. On the other hand, it’s difficult to predict how useful a new feature will be. I’ve never used anything like it. In a few weeks, SearchWiki might be solving problems I didn’t know I had.

Finally, I should say that I’m impressed with how polished the new feature is at launch. Google has managed to add some extraordinary new features without changing the basic layout or aesthetics of their flagship product. And the icons make the functions refreshingly clear.

Nice job, Google.

Endnote’s suit against Zotero headed to a courtroom

2008-11-06T21:16:00.001-06:00

ArsTechnica provides an overview of the legal conflict between EndNote (the leading all-in-one academic research software) and its open-source competitor Zotero. I use Zotero for work, and I recently offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the Firefox add-on, which is still in beta. I’d be misleading you if I offered any insight on the nature of Endnote’s reverse engineering claims against Zotero. I’m not an intellectual property expert (or an expert on much at all :). But I do think the lawsuit opens an intriguing new front in the war between commercial and open source software (via Ars):

Zotero is an open source project led by a pair of academics, Dan Cohen and Sean Takats, at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. Zotero is a plugin for the Firefox browser, and therefore cross-platform, and also has the advantage of being free. It also includes functionality similar to the Mac OS X application Papers, in that it manages PDF libraries, as well as offering users a way to insert references into a document.

The lawsuit, brought by Thomson Reuters against George Mason University and the Comptroller of Virginia, alleges that GMU is in contravention of their EndNote license with their newest version of Zotero, thanks to Zotero having allegedly reverse-engineered the file format that EndNote uses for citation styles in order to offer a similar functionality in Zotero. Thomson Reuters claims that GMU is causing "irreparable harm" to its brand, and is seeking to prevent GMU from distributing the offending application, as well as significant financial damages.

GMU denies this claim, insisting that, although Zotero can read EndNote's .ens files, the application does not convert that data to Zotero's .csl format. GMU has decided not to renew its site license for EndNote, and has re-released the controversial Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview.

Outside of Endnote’s claims against Zotero, I don’t think the extension is all that controversial. As I said in my earlier review, I think the software is an outstanding notemarking tool, even if you don’t ever use the whiz-bang academic features or import your research from Endnote. Indeed, it’s Zotero’s very powerful feature set and very free price that will continue to disrupt the market for expensive commercial options like Endnote.

Delicious Bookmarks add-on closer to syncing with Firefox?

2008-11-03T19:13:00.001-06:00

A new beta version of the Delicious Bookmarks Firefox add-on uses SQLite to store your bookmarks locally instead of RDF. In a post on the Delicious Bookmarks group, product manager Jared Elson said the switch would result in some serious improvements:

1. Extension should be much more stable and usable for users with
large accounts
2. After the initial conversion of your existing RDF file to SQLite
syncing will be faster and more reliable
3. Corruption experienced in previous versions of the extension with
RDF should be a thing of the past

But I wonder whether the SQLite conversion might also help the Delicious team make good on its promise to enable some form of syncing with Firefox’s native bookmarking and history system, Places. You see, Firefox 3 also switched to SQLite as its internal bookmark database.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what advantages a SQLite database has over an RDF, nor am I sure whether Delicious and Firefox using the same storage framework will actually aid their synchronization efforts. So the question in the post title is genuine. Could this alignment in storage methods mean Delicious-Firefox syncing is closer to becoming a reality?

I hope so.

For now, I’ve been using the beta version on two machines for more than a week, and I’ve noticed the performance improvements are real. The bugs seem to be gone, and the add-on is finally handling my favicons properly. You can download the beta if you click here.

Does Twine finally have their shit together?

2008-10-21T20:02:00.001-05:00

A while back, I wrote about Twine and criticized the service for, basically, being slow as shit. Well, today the service leaves private beta and opens to the public. To celebrate, they’ve put together a jokey, NSFW video that aptly describes the site’s purpose and mission:

You use Twine to collect, find some shit, and share that shit with people you know.

Viewing it, I wondered if the self-described “Delicious on steroids” might finally have their shit together. Nope. At least, not from a speed perspective. The site is still too slow and unresponsive to displace its main competitor, Social|Median. Social|Median might be more unfocused and cluttered, and all its features don’t work all the time. But SM is a helluva lot faster than Twine and it has some nice features that actually set it apart from simple bookmarking tools. Even without the ‘roids.

Zotero: The best notetaking / bookmarking hybrid you’re not using

2008-10-14T07:52:00.001-05:00

I use Delicious as for public bookmarking and sharing, because it works great with my Tumblr blog, FriendFeed, and Facebook. When it comes to personal reference and easy, social publishing, Delicious is where it’s at. But in my job as a lawyer and researcher, I need something more powerful—and more private.

Until a few months ago, I had been using the Scrapbook Firefox extension as my workplace personal assistant. Scrapbook captures links, snippets, and full Web pages to a private, searchable, client-side notebook. It also allows you to edit and highlight your saved Web pages. The one drawback with Scrapbook is that it doesn’t sync with my two computers at home; my notes are trapped at work.

Enter Zotero Sync Preview. It does pretty much everything Scrapbook does (without some of Scrapbook’s deep link features), but it also syncs across computers and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) using either Zotero’s server or your own. If that were all Zotero did, it would be awfully amazing. But Zotero is the most full-featured Web research tool you get at any price, and it’s free. To get a feel for what Zotero can do, watch this video. Trust me, it’s worth six minutes of your time.

You might be thinking, “This tool seems like it’s built for academic researchers. I don’t need a tool that organizes, automates, and exports bibliographies and citations.” Neither do I. Don’t let Zotero’s academic focus scare you away from its amazing feature set. It’s not just for liberal-arts majors and scholars.

I first came across Zotero in law school, and although I was impressed with its ability to grab bibliographic data from sources like JSTOR and Lexis-Nexis, I now rely more on Zotero’s meat and potatoes features:

Make local copies of web pages, and add your own highlights and annotations
Sync your notes, items, and links across computers using Zotero’s servers or your own.
Organize your stuff using both folders and tags. You can place items into more than one folder, and even identify related items within a folder.
Save attachments, such as PDFs, and sync them (must have your own server to sync attachments).
Automatically grab metadata from sites like the New York Times, Blogger, and Amazon, in addition to traditional academic databases.
Export items in your library or specific folders to a number of other formats.
Customize column views and sort your saved items.
Set custom keyboard shortcuts.
Extend Zotero with plugins and 1,100 bibliographic citation styles (if you’re into that kind of thing).

And that’s really just scratching the surface. Recently Zotero released a new online viewer for Sync users that store their bookmarks and items on Zotero’s servers. The viewer is painfully simple right now, but that’s perfect for iPhone users who want mobile access to their research (yes, there’s a customized iPhone view).

It’s obvious I love Zotero, and I chose it as my workplace bookmarker for it’s robust feature set and killer sync capabilities, as well as its emphasis on private research. But I do have a few caveats.

First, this is not going to replace Delicious or Diigo as your social bookmarking tool. Nor will import items from those services. Zotero is best understood as a powerful, but supplemental tool for focused (not necessarily academic) research.

Second, Zotero is more complicated than your average Firefox add-on. But they’ve got a Web site with documentation and forums for users who are dedicated to unlocking its full potential. On the other hand, I’m using about 40-50% of the available feature set, and without trying too hard it’s already better than anything similar I’ve tried. However, if Zotero is too much for you, I evaluated Iterasi as a workplace bookmarking tool, and it’s an excellent, more traditional bookmarking alternative. That, of course, is a separate post that hasn’t been written yet.

New Evernote release: Smartly done Delicious importing

2008-09-23T07:45:00.004-05:00

In an email last night, Evernote announced several updates to their various platforms, including a flexible import feature for Delicious bookmarks:

You can now import your Delicious bookmarks right into Evernote. To do this, click the link above to sign in your account, then click the "Settings" link. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Import Delicious Bookmarks, then follow the instructions. The import process will bring over links, tags (optionally), and any associated notes. Each bookmark will become an individual note. Delicious limits the number of people that can use the importer at the same time. So, if it's busy, just come back in a bit and try again.

I gave the feature a try last night, and I’m really impressed with how well Evernote has implemented this feature. I’ll take you through the screen shots.

Evernote promises a “simple 3-step process,” and it is simple, but they give you lots of options.

After inputting you Delicious information, Evernote allows you to decide what gets imported, and how you want it to look.

Import all bookmarks or filter by tag.
You can choose to retain tags or strip them.
Select a destination notebook or create a new one.

This last step is critically important, and awesome. Evernote tells you exactly how many bookmarks it’s fetching and more importantly, they let you know how many tags you’re about to add. When I got to this step, I decided I didn’t need to add all those tags to an already crowded sidebar. Indeed, one of my criticisms of both Evernote and Google Notebook is the lack of a space-saving tag cloud option. I certainly don’t need a line for every tag. But I digress.

What do your Bookmarks look like once they’re imported?

Well, this is still my least favorite thing about Evernote: the default view is optimized for photos and drawings rather than text. But you can switch over to list view.

Either way, the date and time info is prominently displayed. Some people will really like this, because Delicious deprecated the timestamp feature in its recent update.

Overall, I’m extremely impressed. Evernote continues to do the little things very well, and this flexible Delicious import feature is just more of the same. As I’ve said before, I’m a fairly dedicated Google Notebook user. But Evernote is a great option for lots of people. Their approach to bookmark integration is certainly much more elegant and configurable than Google Notebook. Add that to their unbeatable sync options and superb mobile apps, and *presto* you’ve got your Delicious bookmarks on your freaking phone.

That’s pretty compelling.

Apologies for the long droughts between posts.

2008-09-17T18:30:00.000-05:00

I will have a few substantive posts for you once power is restored to my house (as a Houstonian, I'm still coping with Ike).

But beyond my current, weather-related constraints, I have to set realistic expectations. My day job is working as a lawyer for a hospital. This means I take a lot of notes and do a ton of research. But it also means that blogging is, for me, a hobby. This is a place for me to share my web-dork inclinations with people who care about such things (shockingly, most of my pals do not share my interest in what the digerati call "social media" and "web 2.0").

My goal is one or two posts per week—at most. Lately, you haven't even got that from me. But I'll start up again. Soon. In the meantime, I urge you to check out a couple of places where I funnel interesting stories about web-based bookmarking and notetaking, or notemarking:

I share lots of Notemarking items via a cloudnotes tag in Google Reader. That stream is updated in the sidebar of this blog, but you can also access it here.
Lately, I've been using the increasingly awesome Social|Median to collect updates and blog posts from around the Web. I encourage you to join the Notemarking News Network on Social Median if you want to access a broad range of items focused on web-based bookmarking and notetaking.

Thanks for enjoying CloudNotes, and I'll return soon.

Bookmarking in Google’s Chrome Browser

2008-09-03T00:05:00.002-05:00

After reading all the Chrome posts yesterday and today, I knew better than to expect a bunch of showy links to Google properties such as Gmail, Google Reader, or even Google.com. Indeed, Google showed admirable restraint in focusing narrowly upon enhancing the browsing experience. That meant a smooth import process that transfers all your browser settings, including your default search engine (even if it’s not Google).

Google extended their open and easy approach to Chrome’s bookmarking functionality. Chrome doesn’t link up directly with Google Bookmarks. Instead, Chrome offers a less functional version of Firefox’s bookmark engine. Chrome imports your bookmarks and browsing history from Firefox (you do use Firefox, don’t you?) and seamlessly incorporates them into Omni Bar, its version of Firefox’s Awesome Bar.

There are a few key differences from the Firefox approach. First, the Omni Bar includes search results from your default search engine. I’m not sold on this approach because the suggested auto-complete results in Omni Bar aren’t as relevant for me. Take a look at the screenshots below to see what I’m talking about.

Gmail search in the Awesome Bar using only “gm”

The same search in Omni Bar doesn’t get me close to Gmail.

If Chrome learned from my past searches the way Firefox does, it would automatically provide me with Gmail as the top result. This is minor, considering Chrome is a beta release, but it’s something that will need to be improved.

The second key difference is the abbreviated feature set of Chrome’s core bookmarking engine. The appearance is quite similar.

Firefox’s bookmark dialog

Chrome bookmark dialog

Note that unlike Firefox, there’s no way to add tags or keywords, or even edit them. You also can’t search your bookmarks outside of the Omni Bar. Again, this seems pretty forgivable since it’s a beta release. On the other hand, it does look like they lifted the bookmarking engine directly from Firefox. Why not incorporate all of Firefox’s bookmarking features?

One nice thing about Chrome’s approach is the screen you see when you open a new tab.

The display includes both recent bookmarks and most visited sites. This is incredibly useful, but I don’t view it as a huge advantage for Chrome, because both Firefox and Internet Explorer are likely to integrate similar features in the future.

Overall, I have to admit I’m not impressed with Chrome’s bookmarking capabilities. And I’m worried that the lack of tags might indicate an unwillingness to integrate with Web-based bookmarking services, including Google’s own bookmarking product. Scott McCloud’s otherwise awesome Chrome comic book hints that Google may not be very enthusiastic about bookmarking, when your Omni Bar can locate the item much more quickly.

That might be true. If the Omni Bar worked as well as the Firefox’s Awesome bar. It doesn’t. At least, not yet.

Magnolia goes open source? That’s great, I guess.

2008-08-22T20:50:00.004-05:00

Magnolia is going open source, and will allow any site publisher to use their platform in building their own personalized version of the feature-rich social bookmarking engine. Every story I’ve read suggests the company wants to become the Wordpress.org for the social bookmarking set.

My take: I think it’s kind of neat. I especially like the fact that bookmarks saved to user-hosted satellite installations can also be sent back to the Ma.gnolia mothership. It offers niche publishers and groups a more personalized social bookmarking option with enhanced control over their data. And, if it takes off, it could allow the company to gain market share in a field that’s dominated by Delicious and otherwise crowded with a lot of pretenders.
Nevertheless, I’m skeptical about the proposition’s overall value for two reasons.

Solving a problem that may not exist

First, is there a need for this sort of thing? Yes… and no.

Yes, I do think collaborative bookmarking for groups is a nut that needs to be cracked. Employers and other groups who share similar interests could certainly use a more focused and flexible social bookmarking environment. Delicious doesn’t offer a feature for groups, and this opening has encouraged companies like Social|Median, Twine, Reddit, and Mixx to approach the problem from different angles. The efforts in the space are at such an early stage, it seems the perfect time for Ma.gnolia to offer itself as a kind of white-label alternative to Delicious.

On the other hand, the analogy to Wordpress raises some red flags. Wordpress offered publishers and companies something that was already in the Web’s DNA: Blogging. Content management. An all-in-one Web site. But the idea of a self-hosted, user maintained bookmarking service doesn’t seem to meet the same unmet need. Why would I say that? For the same reason there aren’t a ton of group blogs out there.

Lots of people will build and host a blog for themselves or their small business. Significantly fewer people will create a blog that has multiple users. It happens, but I will unscientifically suggest that group blogs hosted on Wordpress or Moveable Type are more rare than single-author blogs. Rarer still are the individuals who host their own wikis or social networks, especially with hosted solutions like PBWiki and Ning available. Finally, Ma.gnolia and Reddit offer users a self-hosted bookmarking option? “This will be great for my friends / coworkers,” says E. Adopter! “They will love it!”

As soon as you explain it to them.

And that’s the sad truth. I have 254 friends on Facebook. I follow 90 on Twitter (with 144 followers). I’ve got 24 people in my Delicious network. Mileage may vary, as they say, but what is your gut telling you? Not a lot of people need this.

Ma.gnolia isn’t all that exciting

Second, is Ma.gnolia your first choice for an open source bookmarking service? Read Write Web’s coverage of Magnolia’s open source announcement was very positive, but it ended on a sour note:

Will communities all over the web download, customize and participate in a federated Ma.gnolia? Maybe. It's hard to know. Unfortunately, Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff's presentation announcing the open sourcing of Ma.gnolia here at Gnomedex illustrates the problems the company will continue to face. Just like the service Halff created, the man himself seems like a brilliant guy who you know has great ideas but communicates them poorly enough that it frustrates people pretty quickly. The value proposition is unclear, the site architecture is frustrating - right now it's a service for standards true believers. This author uses it personally, though almost every time I do I grumble and ask whether I should go back to using Delicious.That’s been my experience with Ma.gnolia, too. It looks great on paper. It’s got tons of features. It’s a model for all sites that want to embrace open standards. It’s…still not a viable alternative to Delicious.

I touched on Delicious.com’s dominance in earlier post, but it’s worth repeating. The Delicious API makes it super easy to take your bookmarks to another service that has more features (e.g., Diigo and Ma.gnolia). Indeed, both those services allow you to seamlessly populate their service with your Delicious bookmarks using just a few clicks. And still, despite lagging in social-ness and open-ness, Delicious continues to dominate. Why? Because Delicious is better. Users can easily try out alternatives, but they keep coming back.

Ma.gnolia going open-source means you can start your own inferior bookmarking service. For people who’ve been wanting to build and maintain their own social bookmarking site, I guess that’s all they’ve got. But I can’t help thinking they’d rather be running Delicious on their servers.

Conclusion

Despite my skepticism, I do think an open source Ma.gnolia will be a great option for companies, groups, and classrooms that want their own little slice of social bookmarking. An open source Ma.gnolia will be especially compelling if it works on corporate and university intranets. It will also be interesting to see if the Ma.gnolia architecture will be extensible and themeable the way Wordpress is. That would be unequivocally cool.

Nevertheless, I believe that individuals who want to share bookmarks with like-minded people are better served using an existing social bookmarking hub that supports groups, which I think is just about every other bookmarking site but Delicious. The network effects, such as they are, will be more powerful than on a self-hosted site.

The fact that Delicious remains the most popular bookmarking service, even without a group feature, should tell you one of two things:

No one has done groups in the right way yet. The service that perfects group bookmarking will fill a much-needed niche.
Hardly anyone cares about group bookmarking.

I really hope it isn’t number two.

Diigo loses me again.

2008-08-17T11:52:00.002-05:00

I’ve tried to get into Diigo, the much ballyhooed Delicious alternative, a couple of times. Each time I do, I’m confronted with shortcomings that kill the deal.

First, they were even later than Delicious in releasing an add-on that was compatible with Firefox 3. Obviously, I wasn’t going to use IE while waiting for Diigo to get its act together.

Next, there were problems with its ability cross-post to Delicious. It was always a crapshoot whether the bookmarks were actually going to get there, and the Delicious update has made things even more unpredictable. Obviously, this feature isn’t a must have. Indeed, having such a feature is a plus for Diigo, because it lets users hedge their bets when deciding whether Diigo is for them. That’s exactly I’ve been trying to do, and over the last two days crossposting has been working fine, despite Diigo informing me that my Delicious account is unvalidated.

Unfortunately, Diigo’s tool-bar / add-on hasn’t worked for me all that well in my most recent testing, and I’m almost ready to give up again. Sure, it’s now compatible with Firefox 3. And it’s beautifully designed to take full advantage of Diigo’s admittedly copious social features. But when I search for items in the sidebar or on the site, the search feature is either glacially slow or it simply FAILS. As you can see in the screencap below, a search request at the site gets me plenty of ads, but no bookmarks.

If you can’t see it, Diigo’s error message reads:

We are in the process of rebuilding the tag search index as part of a major server and database upgrade to provide you with speedier performance and to support Diigo's rapidly growing user base. This may take up to 24 hours. Thank you for your understanding.

Obviously Diigo is struggling to remedy their historically slow and buggy search capabilities. But because the Delicious Bookmarks add-on handles such searches effortlessly, it’s particularly difficult to tolerate Diigo’s poor performance. Diigo may be spectacularly social, but if Diigo fails to recall my saved items, it’s failing at bookmarking. This post offers a compelling list of “six reason Diigo is better than Delicious.” But none of that matters if you can’t find my stuff when I ask for it. None of that matters if you aren’t actually bookmarking anything for me.

Maybe my insistence on being able to search my bookmarks is a bit myopic. Perhaps I should view Diigo as a purely social bookmarking service, in which reference and recall aren’t really the point. Instead, maybe Diigo is more like an advanced version of Digg or Stumbleupon where sharing is the point and personal reference is an afterthought.

My conception of social bookmarking gives equal weight to both concepts. To be a social bookmarking service your service must embrace two functions:

Quick reference to my bookmarked items, with the ability to privately store items as I choose.
Flexible sharing options, including both passive sharing with a network of friends and the ability to export or post items to a blog or aggregator (e.g., FriendFeed, Swurl, Second|Brain, Socialthing).

But two recent posts I read call into question my assumptions about Social Bookmarking. First, Digital Inspiration shared some data indicating that Facebook and MySpace were among the leading social bookmarking sites, well ahead of Delicious. There’s an obvious caveat to the data. As RWW pointed out, most Delicious users probably share their items with the Delicious bookmarklet—not the “Share This” plug-in from which the article’s data was pulled. But I think the posts by RWW and Digital Inspiration raise a more important question:

Since when are Myspace and Facebook considered bookmarking sites?

Neither provides easy access to your history of shared items. Certainly there’s not a reference system for your bookmarks that’s even as robust as what Mixx or Digg provide. Delicious is a bookmarking site. Facebook, Myspace, Digg, and Mixx are something else entirely, because they focus on sharing and couldn’t care less about performing the core function inherent in the word “bookmark”: I want to save something for later, for my personal reference.

Social bookmarking is about sharing. But it’s also about extending the personal reference functions that were first featured in the pioneering Netscape browser. When it comes to Diigo, my question is, “how concerned is Diigo about personal reference?” Hutch Carpenter helped me focus on this question a few days ago.

Carpenter thinks Diigo isn’t about bookmarking for personal reference, but about using your shared content as a springboard for social interaction. Carpenter’s post is a superb overview of Diigo’s social features, and he perfectly sums up the differing social concepts of the two services:

The new Delicious continues its mission of organizing a massive number of user-generated bookmarks and tags. It looks cleaner, and I like the way information is presented. Information organized by an army of user librarians. “Social” in this context means your bookmarks and tags are exposed to others, and you can find related content based on what others are bookmarking and tagging. People are the basis for discovering content.

Diigo wants people to interact via common interests in content. It has a lot of social network hooks. “Social” in this context means establishing and building relationships with others. Content is the basis for finding people.

What Carpenter’s post doesn’t address is whether Diigo is an adequate substitute for Delicious’s powerful reference capabilities. In other words, is Diigo any good at bookmarking.

I really want to use Diigo. I really want to like Diigo. But I’m not going to have two freaking toolbars cluttering my browser. And Diigo isn’t going to make me a convert until it’s good at both social and bookmarking.