The Social Bookmarking Faceoff. Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players - del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Social Bookmarking Faceoff Reloaded. That del.icio.us dominates the social bookmarking space is clear, but by how much?
Finally, A Web Annotation Product That Makes Sense: WebNotes PR. I am not a big fan of Web annotation services that let people add their own virtual Sticky Notes or comments to Web pages for others to see.
But Web annotation is back with the launch today of Google’s Sidewiki. To be honest, I don’t have high hopes for Sidewiki. Marking up the Web has limited appeal to the average consumer. A better approach, if you are not Google, is to make Web annotation an enterprise product and go after a specific industry that will actually value (and pay) for it.
Boston-based WebNotes is doing just that by shifting its focus from consumers to professionals. One thing PR firms do is keep track of all press and blog mentions of their clients and deliver these clips on a daily or weekly basis. WebNotes PR lets someone at a PR agency highlight articles and blog posts online, add sticky notes, and pull excerpts into digital reports with links back to the highlighted versions. Blerp Aims To Turn The Web Into One Big Forum. San Francisco startup RocketOn, the company behind a virtual world platform that bares the same name, has more tricks up its sleeve and is today showing off the second product it created.
The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp, and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends. Under the motto ‘layer the web!’ , Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. Diigo Buys Web Page Clipping Service Furl Away From LookSmart. Reframe It Retreads Web Annotation As A Browser Add-On. The idea of annotating the Web has been around for a long time.
It goes back to a failed Web 1.0 startup called Third Voice. Today there are a handful of Web startups (Diigo, Fleck, Stickis, ShiftSpace, TrailFire) that let you mark up any Web page by adding virtual sticky notes or comments in a sidebar. One of these, ActiveWeave/Stickis, had to reboot as BlogRovr and eventually sold itself to BuzzLogic. Now, a new startup that officially launches today, Reframe It, is trying its hand at the same game. The company has raised $700,000 from AD Gilhart & Co., and it boasts an impressive advisory board which includes Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Howard Rheingold.
Easy Website Highlighting and Notes with Awesome Highlighter. I believe we’ve all experienced some of the repercussions that have come from having so much information at our fingertips.
We’ve seen plenty of social bookmarking sites pop-up and we’ve also seen interesting developments with social annotating sites like Fleck and Stickis (we compared five social annotation sites here). All are attempting the same task – organizing and categorizing information on the web. Recently, a Y Combinator-backed startup called Awesome Highlighter has started to make a splash. Awesome Highlighter is a company that provides a tool that enables you to go to a website and highlight information to save for later or share with your friends.
The way it works is quite simple. Slingpage Lets You Share the Web With One Click (500 Private Beta Invites) The idea of leaving sticky notes on the Web for others to find has been tried many times, but has never really taken off.
Third Voice dotbombed with the idea in the late 1990s, then Activeweave tried it with Stickis (only to abandon the idea in favor for an app called BlogRovr, which was recently acquired by BuzzLogic). Diigo Revamps Social Bookmarking Service with v3.0. Diigo Tackles Recommendations. Diigo is a social bookmarking and research tool that offers so many features it's overwhelming.
I've been excited about it before, only to find that after a short period of time, I stop using it - in favor of something simpler. I have been really excited about it, in fact, but even the highlights of today's new version leave me with tempered enthusiasm. The highlight of the new version is recommendations. Best growing newish services of 2008 (is Louis Gray right?) Diigo 3.0: The all-powerful personal, social bookmarking service. I was impressed by the preview I got in September of the bookmarking and Web annotation tool Diigo 3.0.
It's taken the company until this morning to release this version to the public. In the interim the team has added features and tweaked the design. Diigo to Launch Website Slideshow Feature Next Week. Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week.
The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner. Diigo @ DEMOfall 07 – A True 3D Information App? Diigo.com announced their re-launch today with an information network unlike any we have seen in scope or capability. The new Diigo network being unveiled at DEMOfall 07 creates global communities around data, information, interests and knowledge.
These new communities engage and connect people around the content they collect and use. Diigo is already one of the most useful bookmarking and research sites on the Web. Five Ways to Mark Up the Web. In 1999, Eng-Sion Tan and two friends launched Third Voice, a browser plugin that would let anyone make annotations on webpages. The intent was to encourage freer speech on the internet, but many slammed it as “Web Graffiti.” The company eventually shut down. The idea of web page annotation didn’t die with Third Voice, though. New services, each with unique features, have carried on. Diigo is a research tool that rocks. I just looked at the new research megatool Diigo and though several bloggers have covered it in the past and in previous incarnations (including our charming leader) I think they really missed the boat when many called it an unexciting entry into the crowded social bookmarking space.
This is a web based knowledge worker’s dream come true, it’s the kind of thing that makes me love web apps. The Reno, Nevada based company’s name is an acronym for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.” It does offer a browser bookmarklet, but you’ll want to grab the Firefox or IE toolbar to use the best Diigo has to offer. In addition to nailing the basics in social bookmarking, there are many features here that give this system huge value whether or not it ever builds a network effect from a large number of users. My favorite feature? Diigo Launches – More Than Just Bookmarking. Diigo, known for its social annotation, finally went public yesterday. The service aims to turn the web writable allowing users to privately or publicly annotate any website they visit, in turn making a “participatory and interactive media” for its users.
I must say that even though I have had an account for Diigo’s private beta since I last reviewed it late December, I have been anticipating its launch. So much has changed since my last review including social bookmarking enhancements, new annotation tools, tools built for bloggers, and more. Diigo – Enough Evolution? Diigo, which stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”, is a social bookmarking site that allows users to highlight multiple content areas, including pictures, tag the page, and bookmark it. Users can also add sticky notes to a highlighted text area.
Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares.