background preloader

Bookmarks: Soon Obsolete? - PCWorld

Bookmarks: Soon Obsolete? - PCWorld
Since the Web first came online in 1991, it has grown and improved beyond anyone's predictions. Unlike the gray background, mono-spaced text and ugly graphics on the Web in those early years, today's Web is rich with video, interactive applications and other useful and distracting goodies. But even after all these years, the way we find, navigate and save content on the Web works pretty much like it always did. Here's a page with text. Some of the words are hyperlinked, so when you click on them, you open another page. But now there's a conspicuously innovative new option. The service is functionally similar in some ways to social bookmarking sites, but its core function is "curation," which Wikipedia defines as the "selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets." Described by one blogger as a social bookmarking tool based on "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," Pearltrees looks a bit like Google's "Wonder Wheel," but it isn't used the same way.

Pearltrees: What problem does Pearltrees solve Elgan: Why bookmarking is obsolete Opinion June 19, 2010 07:00 AM ET Computerworld - Since the Web first came online in 1991, it has grown and improved beyond anyone's predictions. Unlike the gray background, mono-spaced text and ugly graphics on the Web in those early years, today's Web is rich with video, interactive applications and other useful and distracting goodies. But even after all these years, the way we find, navigate and save content on the Web works pretty much like it always did. Here's a page with text. But now there's a conspicuously innovative new option. The service is functionally similar in some ways to social bookmarking sites, but its core function is "curation," which Wikipedia defines as the "selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets." Described by one blogger as a social bookmarking tool based on "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," Pearltrees looks a bit like Google's "Wonder Wheel," but it isn't used the same way. Maybe you follow several sports.

PearlTrees: Social Bookmarking introduces Teams Never Mind the Valley: Here's Paris If you're capable of seeing past the old stones of Paris and the picturesque rural villages, you'll realize that France is every bit as technologically advanced as any other Western country - more so in some areas. Not only does the country have a higher percentage of homes with high-speed Internet than the U.S. (plus it's faster and costs half as much), it ranks first in the world for number of blogs per Internet user, and has a formidable market of Internet consumers who spent €5.5 billion online in the first quarter of this year. When I came to Paris in 2006, I had a well-developed idea for a startup and nothing else. Pamela Poole is a blogger, translator and tech writer, and founder of Francophilia.com, a social startup for Francophiles. There's a thriving geek culture in Paris, and no lack of software development expertise, thanks to superior universities that produce superior engineers. Want to start up in France? The Big Players Incubators, Accelerators, Competitions The Funding

Peartrees: Multi-dimensional Curation A few weeks ago now, I posted an opinion piece on Technorati titled, 'Why Social Media Curation Matters'. Following this I received quite a lot of feedback and it’s thanks to one of these comments – posted by on my blog – that I was led to Pearltrees. In addition to this, I was also motivated to re-evaluate my position on the subject of curation and take a closer look at what I perceived that to be. At first I made the rather naïve assumption that the difference between Pearltrees and the services I’d discussed in my previous articles both here and on my blog, was purely aesthetic – Pearltrees has a beautifully designed Flash interface. Nonetheless, they are just lists. The answer can be summed up in one word, depth.

How the iPad is Changing Interaction Design Applications that looked amazing on larger multi-touch experiences like Microsoft Surface may have a more affordable consumer-facing counterpart. While the iPad has been widely criticized, many startups are thrilled by its possibilities. In mid-November we featured Paris-based Pearltrees as a new design interface for remapping Web information. Pearltrees is a new way of organizing information where users create mindmap-style visualizations of their favorite websites and Web-based media. Says Lamothe, "The idea of physically touching and moving items on a screen is in the DNA of Pearltrees. Nevertheless, while Lamothe sees the potential in the tablet's touch interface, the fact that the device does not currently support Flash is a problem for the CEO. Says Lamothe, "I believe tablets can open up an entirely new field, something I would call 'casual browsing'.

pearltrees > blog Collect, Process and Share Your Online Research with Trailmeme Social bookmarking sites like Delicious are useful for collecting bookmarks, but they don't allow users to really draw connections and tell stories. That's where curation-focused services like Pearltrees and Trailmeme come in. Trailmeme, which we first looked at in December, was incubated at Xerox and launches at DEMO this week. It allows users to bookmark sites and then organize them in tidy diagrams, making it easy to highlight the relationship between different items and for readers to browse these links. While Pearltrees only allows users to display connections in a relatively simple tree structure, Trailmeme offers its users more flexibility. Besides allowing users to create their own trails, they can also browse and search other users' trails. The company offers a toolbar for Firefox and a universal bookmarklet for creating trails, as well as plugins for WordPress and - in the near future - MediaWiki. A New Kind of Publishing Will Users Care?

Related: