Tag renaming
The other day, while writing about BlogMarks.net, I got a bit excited about the ability to rename a tag.
“…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.”
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess to learning that BlinkList can do the same thing, I just hadn’t noticed yet. Simpy, in fact, goes one step further and has a Tag Management screen that lets you rename, merge, split or remove tags. Doh. Boy, is my face red for not having noticed that before. I’m sure, in hindsight, that del.icio.us does as well, but I haven’t gone back to look yet.
Regardless of how it is done, I have to confess it sure is useful. I still struggle with coming up with my own little “taxonomy” for “stuff I like”, let alone trying to have it somewhat match what the rest of the world does!
Oh, speaking of tagging… been to Tagyu yet? So cool… feed it some text and it’ll spit out some tags. One of the plugins I use for this blog (ultimate tag warrior) even hits it via api.
Social Bookmarking so far
So far this week I’ve looked at del.icio.us, Simpy, Furl and Blinklist. In my (humble) opinion, all have their strengths and weeknesses — and all have interested folks watching for blog posts about themselves. In fact, that may have been the most interesting thing about the posts: watching to see who would reply next. Fun stuff, to be sure.
Am I done looking at these things? Probably not. What have I learned so far? Well, let me share a bit.
First, for several I whinged that I wanted to be able to “subscribe to tags”. I’ve had replies via email and blog comments here that they all do indeed, to some extent, support this — or, as in Simpy’s case, will have it very soon. Awesome! As usual, I just wasn’t quite “getting it”, but I believe I do now. And RSS or clever urls is the ticket to doing this. Neat stuff. As a for instance, if I want to watch for “pocketpc” tags on Furl, I could just add http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=pocketpc to my RSS reader and I’m set. Problem solved.
So far, I find myself gravitating towards BlinkList most often.. but I’m not exactly sure why. Oh, and I tried the BlinkList Firefox extension. For about 5 minutes. Toolbar. /sigh Great concept, I just don’t like toolbars. The one from del.icio.us was much more appealing, to me at least. Just added a couple big buttons. But ya know, at the end of the day I just use the bookmarklets anyways.
Oh, and I had mentioned BlinkList’s “blink” buttons. Basically, it does a few things. Tells you how many people have “blinked’ that link. Click the main button and see who has it. But, click the lower “blink it” and you add it to your links as well. A quick way to look at other folks’ links and snag ‘em for yourself. Truly, it feels rather like digg…
Finally, I’m still hoping to learn more about OnlyWire… such a great idea, but apparently deep under cover. Anyone know of any other similar services?
Summary: Still have more to look at in this space. Even have a social search thing (seekum) to check out some day too. Liking BlinkList, but still intrigued by both Simpy, Furl and del.icio.us (about in that order I think). Making a decision just out of the 4 I’ve seen so far will be difficult. Wonder what the others will be like?
Social Bookmarking, day 3
After last night’s “challenges” with Simpy, I’m happy to say that Otis had responded to my support request and followed up with some more comments here. Dude must not sleep much! Anyways, my imported links showed up and I’m happy.
Used it a bit today and am generally pleased. Was just a bit too swamped at the office to really surf much, but did find a couple links over lunch that I was able to quickly tag as “ToRead” and toss into the pile. Having my bookmarks public is going to be interesting… the world will see how I tend to let my “to read” pile build for weeks!
Just for grins, I gave Furl a look this evening. My first impression was … not good. Just the interface rubbed me wrong, but I figured I shouldn’t be quite so hasty. So I signed up and had a deeper look. Was almost done immediately as I misread some of the intro pages — it sure looked like the only way to use the thing was with a toolbar. And I “just say no” to toolbars! But, after I reread things I found the usual bookmarklet available and got to business.
These guys don’t just save the bookmark — they save the whole page! Woah… that surprised me a bit. When you are looking at your own personal archive you can choose to visit the link -or- view the saved copy of the page. Interesting concept.
The Furl UI is “average”. It doesn’t hurt the eyes at least, nor does it excite me overly much. It is certainly functional and clean and tolerable. Performance seems fine too.
The link saving method is not quite my cup of tea. Kind of a belts and suspenders approach. Not only do you choose a category (or multiple categories), but you can also set some keywords. For the moment I think I’ll just grab one category per post and sprinkle in a few keywords and pretend they’re like tags… Useablility for me suffers a bit though. The other services keep your previously used tag list around and/or even suggest tags that other used. Didn’t see that with Furl so far. Makes things a bit tedious.
There appears to be a del.icio.us importer that I’m trying right now… [later: with zero success, I might add]
Something I’d like to see from both Furl and Simpy is the ability to easily search outside of my own stuff. I want to be able to define a few tags and put a “watch” on ‘em and keep an eye on what other people are finding. Maybe they have that already, but I’ve not found it yet.
Social Bookmarking, part deux: Simpy
Yesterday I put up a post mentioning that I finally got around to giving del.icio.us a shot. One of the comments I received on that post was from a guy who runs a competitor: Simpy. So I gave it a shot tonight.
Mixed impression.
Interface? Worlds better than delicious’s. Easier on the eyes for sure.
I really liked the notion of his del.icio.us importer. What an awesome idea for growth! I mean heck, if you’re going to search the blogosphere for posts about the competition, it sure doesn’t hurt to be able to take their imports. Great idea. He also offers exports — another nice feature.
It seems to have worked. Kinda? I see all my tags have definitely moved over. And I’m a complete sucker for a nice tag cloud. Love that. Gotta do that for my blog some day! But yet, my links (guessing on that url, he’s doing maintenance) don’t show the imported stuff. Maybe I’m not being patient enough. I’ll check back in the morning and see what happens. Or maybe I started this as they were starting maintenance? Maybe I should mention I have no patience…
Peter mentioned Furl in a comment, so I reckon I’ll be trying that one soon too.
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