Solo Technology

There are a lot more Social Bookmarking sites out there beyond the few that I’ve looked at so far (del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy, BlinkList) and setting a goal to review every one of them would be a bit tedious and likely very boring. However, I do have a small list of sites that have been mentioned via email and comments that I thought I could at least take a look at. So tonight it is BlogMarks‘ turn in the barrel, as it were.

We’ll start with the text from the About page:

Blogmarks.net is a free & open bookmarks manager based on keywords (aka Tags) and sharing. With Blogmarks.net you’ll be able to store and share with other users your favorite websites trough a “blog-like” technology. Your bookmarks will now be available from any internet connection and accessible from a variety of others services trough our API.

As is often the case, registration is very simple. Username/password/password/(optional)email. Boom, done. Ok, so move on in to the site and see what we got.

Start with the usual: Bookmarklets. I grabbed “Add to Blogmarks” and tossed it up on my (very) crowded bookmarks toolbar — where would these apps be without bookmarklets?!? Works about as expected. When you use it you also get a nice little picture of the site you just marked.

Move on from there and look for import and export options. Ah, yep — we have those too. Good deal. So, we can import from Atom, RSS, Mozilla/Netscape bookmarks and/or del.icio.us. I tried the final one just to see how it worked. And… while it took a while (about 4 minutes), it did indeed grab my bookmarks from del.icio.us. Good deal, it even brought over the tags which is always a plus.

To give it a challenge, next I exported my BlinkList links to an xml file and then fed that to the importer as an RSS feed. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the RSS importer would look for a local file -or- a remote url. That import took 3 or 4 minutes as well, but alas no tags.

Neither import method gets you screenshots like the bookmarklet tagger does. bummer. I also tried selecting an imported mark and hitting “update” to see if that would get me a screenie, but no dice. Oh well, not the end of the world.

So far, I’m more impressed than I had planned to be. Many nice little touches, and I haven’t even mentioned the tag cloud yet. As an aside, Zeldman compares the tagcloud to the mullet… I’ve done both (*cough*) and I’ll stick with the tagcloud, thanks. BlogMarks’ tagcloud isn’t visually stunning. It does your basic cloud with all black text, more frequent stuff larger than less frequent stuff (yeah, I like BlinkList’s “rainbow of cloud” better); but, what is very cool here, is that when you click a tag, not only do you see all your links for that tag, but you get a little editor for that tag. Sure, you can delete the tag right there (and that will ripple through all tagged links) but what’s more exciting is you can rename the tag too. On the fly! Looking at your cloud and realize you have blogs and blogging and really only want one of those? Click on “blogs”, rename it to “blogging” and everything just fixes itself automagically. Huge maintenance time saver for those of us still puzzing out a tag system that we can work with.

What didn’t i figure out? Something called Blog Sync, but it involved giving it my blog’s uri, my RSS feed’s URI and my blog username and password. Uh, since I don’t know what this thing does, I think I’ll pass on that one, thanks!

Final random observations: Lot’s of “non-english” bookmarks (not overwhelmingly so). Pretty decent performance. Quite tolerable interface. Never did figure out how to provide a link to “my stuff”. Worth a look if you’re shopping for something in the bookmarking space.

One Response to “Social Bookmarking: BlogMarks.net”

1. Stalker of Things Vanilla on January 25th, 2006 12:06 am
   

   WTH is a social bookmark? One with a lot of friends?

   Whats a bookmarklet? A small baby book mark?

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