Category bookmark

Amazon bookmark service

Various people around the blogosphere noted that Amazon introduced tags. I did not see it yet on Amazon.fr, so I headed over to Amazon.com. Near a product-item a user sees a field where he can enter a tag. This tag is however something personal and really is more like a bookmark. This means that the user can see which tags he used for which products. The user can thus create a list of Products, a bookmark list. For Amazon a bookmark just consists of this tag and the related Product. A user can also set whether the bookmark is private or not. There are no titles, no descriptions, no feeds, no permalinks.

[Inspiration Richard McManus]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • bookmark
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XBEL - a bookmark standard

I came across XBEL, a XML standard for exchanging bookmark files. I did not yet see many applications that support. However for my MacOS-X platform there are some conversion programs, for instance from Safari to XBL.

The standard is what I call a List-standard, as it can contain multiple Items, in this case Bookmarks. By the way RSS and OPML is also a List-standard. The standard allows for some internal organisation as it allows for folders (similar to OPML). Each Bookmark-Item bookmark contains two fields: title and desc. The URL is added as an attribute (href) to the bookmark-tag.

I guess this is a good first go. Now people have to support it. Or are there any competitors to this standard. I think some extra fields are required, such as tags, such as is used by del.icio.us and also a language field would be useful. Anyway it is a lot better than putting the bookmarks in an OPML as some namespace has been introduced.

Categories/tags: bookmark
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Why Permalinks?

Otis asked me why a URI-namespace:

The simple answer is: this is the basis for Microcontent. But this is of course not a very satisfying answer and I must say that have not thought much about it yet. But it is a question that undoubtedly will also be relevant to other forms of Microcontent. So I will think a bit out loud.

What I like is to have atomic publishing: everything is published only once and can be referred to if needed. And ideally the publication happens on my webpages or within my domain. Thus I might publish my bookmarks as a RSS-feed. Each entry in the feed corresponds to a bookmark with all its metadata. Part of this metadata is the permalink to a webpage with all the metadata of the bookmark.

If I want to use a bookmark aggregator service, such as Simpy, I only have to submit bookmark-feed. Or they can subscribe to my feed. The aggregator can then check whether a bookmark description has changed or a new one has been added. Permalinks might be useful here as an ID. What I really want to have is an automatic link between the bookmarks I create and publish and the integration with a bookmark service. The only solution for me now is to re-enter all the information for all relevant bookmark aggregators. You might also have an API, such as del.icio.us has, but that is a to technical solution for most people.

Having all bookmarks as separate identifiable files, for which we need a permalink, might open other services. How often is a certain page bookmarked? Bookmarking is the first step in having a relation with a person. It would be great for marketing purposes. But that is true for anything published on Internet.

The question is what is so interesting about bookmarks? For someone who publishes several weblogs, the most interesting things will be put in a weblog, the least interesting things in a bookmark-weblog. Why should I only put the links of bookmarks in a bookmarks aggregator? Why not harvest the links that appear in a weblog-entry? I do not need a bookmarking service for publishing purposes, I do that myself. I do not need a bookmark service for synchronisation purposes. And I do not need is as a startpage. It turns out that I visit only a few sites every day and the other interesting thing appear in my RSS-aggregator. I just saw an entry by Jon Udell how he submits all external links in his weblog to del.icio.us. Why can’t a bookmark aggregator read my weblog-feed and extract the links automatically and add them as bookmarks. Describing an bookmark aggregator in this way the similarities with Technorati come to my mind.

So what is left is the social function. I like to get new ideas, but it is good enough if they appear in my RSS aggregator. But why submit my bookmarks? Come and get them. A well defined bookmark-list will do the work and permalinks help then.

[This answer is not yet good enough. I’ll add upon if something comes on my mind.]

Categories/tags: bookmark , bookmarks del.icio.us simpy open
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Permalink for OpenBookmark

Responding to my post on OpenBookmarks, Otis asks why a bookmark should have a permalink. And whether a URI is not sufficient. I am not quite sure whether I understand the difference between a permalink and an URI. But what I have in mind is a URL that I stays permanent. This means that I can find the bookmark information through a browser. Just as I can find the bookmark of my weblog entry on Simpy through its permalink (or should I call this a URI?). An URI is in general a broader term and can be a query to a database, which results in a HTML-page (or XML-file) with the bookmark information. I guess that is good enough, but I can not oversee the implications. An URI reminds me of the deep web with its hidden content. The implication is that it can not be searched and indexed by Google. Personally I prefer the Permalink.

Anyway an interesting question. Undoubtedly to be continued.

Categories/tags: bookmark
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Quotes

Jon Udell wrote on his weblog on XML.com an entry on interactive microcontent. I found some interesting subjects in this post. He writes:

..., I want to grab complete well-formed fragments from the sources I quote, and I’d like other folks to be able to grab mine.  We ought to be able to hand fragments around without damaging their fidelity, ...

And he is here talking about quotes he puts into his weblog entry, just as I did just now. He created the habit of adding a title and a URL (the permalink of the quote) to such a quote.

Isn’t this very similar to a bookmark? It has a title, a permalink, the citation notes as a blockquote and comments (the surrounding weblog). And when he talks about handing these fragments, then he is talking about Microcontent. And in this case it is an OpenBookmark.

Categories/tags: bookmark
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Open Bookmark

When creating the list with Microcontent examples, I thought of bookmarks. Wit aggrgators such as del.ico.us, this information gets published as well. So it is really some form of Microcontent. A user can publish bookmarks on his personal website (look at my BookMarks) or use an enabling service as del.ico.us.

The fields used by del.ico.us are:

• url - this is the link of the bookmark;
• description - the titke of the bookmark. This does not have the title corresponding to the URL, but can be chosen by the user;
• extended - this is some content that the user can add;
• tags - these are one or multiple keywords a user can add to the bookmark;

The bookmarks with del.ico.us are however not Microcontent, as they do not have a permalink.

Another bookmark service is spurl.net. These service has the following fields for a bookmark:

• URL - the identifier URL as a link;
• Title - the title of the page website (can be chosen by the user);
• Description - some text you can add;
• Keywords - add one or multiple keywords

So far this is the same as del.ico.us, but they decided to add some more fields:

• language - the language of the webpage;
• material - is it explicit content or not?
• protect - keep the bookmark for yourself. This is not really a bookmark issue, but a publication issue;
• comment - information that only the owner can see

Spurl.net does not support permalinks per bookmark either.

Not that the fields of an open bookmark are very similar to that of an openreview. Only in the bookmark case the identifier is an URL. Maybe the two should be combined.

Categories/tags: bookmark
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