In the past you would remember how I have been creating a number of different weblog posts around the subject of social bookmarking indicating a good number of benefits in the Knowledge Management area about why people would want to make extensive use of such tools in order to be able to contribute to that collective wisdom by sharing their favourite bookmarks with everyone else, not just the closest teams / communities to themselves. I have also been indicating how so far I am currently making use of two different social bookmarking tools as my preferred choices: IBM‘s Dogear (For my Intranet bookmarks) and BlinkList (For my Internet bookmarks). Reason why I like these two options is because I feel they are the ones providing with a much more complete experience of what I think social bookmarking should be: i.e. as interactive as possible.
However, I can imagine that other folks may be interested and would want to make use of other options, so just recently I thought I would go and give it a try to one WordPress plugin that would allow me to extend those capabilities to all of the different weblog posts I get to create over here and allow you folks to bookmark whatever weblog posts on the fly and in your favourite tool(s). That way you will not be restricted in any way other than making extensive use of your favourite social bookmarking tool. The lovely plugin currently available and which I am testing over here in elsua is Sociable. For those folks who are also using WordPress as their default weblogging tool, and who would want to give it a try, you can download it over here. Basically, Sociable allows you to select a number of different popular social bookmarking offerings and through some basic configuration add them to every single weblog post you may be sharing directly from the Admin panel.
The result is that within minutes, and without hardly coding from my side, I have now been able to include a bar of items, of bookmarking tools, that people could click on if they would want to bookmark whatever the weblog post. That is why you would be able to find a button for BlinkList (Of course!), del.icio.us (An even more quite an interesting option at the moment since it looks like it apparently allows you import your bookmarks now, once and for all, so I can now see a lovely integration between my BlinkList bookmarks and my Dogear bookmarks coming up using del.icio.us as the connection between the two. Just brilliant!), Digg, Spurl, Furl, Ma.gnolia (An interesting tool I will be weblogging about some time soon), Newsvine, Scutle (Of course, Jean-F, I couldn’t resist the temptation!), Shadows (For those Flock users out there), Simpy and TailRank.
Thus now you would be able to bookmark whatever of elsua‘s weblog post along the way in your favourite bookmarking too and if you see that I have missed any of the popular social bookmarking tools out there just append a comment and if it is available I will gladly go ahead and add it right away. Or alternatively, you could also have a look into the attached weblog post, over at 3spots, 30 Social Bookmarks ‘Add to’ footer links for blogs, in order to be able to add manually up to 30 different social bookmarking buttons to your weblog posts. But remember that most of that would have to be done manually, as opposed to Sociable where you would only need to get it working by clicking a couple of options and off it goes.
Finally, if you are looking as well for an overview of the different social bookmarking tools available out there I would suggest you also take a look into another weblog post I shared a couple of days ago: Web 2.0 Commoditization – ALL Social that CAN bookmark. Over there you will be able to read of an extensive listing of bookmarking tools, with a brief description of how they work and a direct link to it to try it out further. Then over the next few weeks I shall continue weblogging every now and then about the different tools that I may give a try and see how they would fit in not only as collaborative tools but also as Knowledge Management tools so that with my two cents worth of comments there may be other knowledge workers who may benefit from that experience. Thus stay tuned !
Technorati Tags: Sociable, Social Bookmarking, Dogear, BlinkList, del.icio.us, digg, Spurl, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Newsvine, Scutle, Shadows, Simpy, TailRank
Cool… Thanks for adding Tailrank.
BTW… at ETech we brainstormed a technique for ONLY adding the services the person uses. For example I don’t use Furl and while I’m sure its a GREAT service it doesn’t make sense to include it in my list. In fact you could use this to give MUCH larger icons to the other services that I DO use.
Anyway.. If you work up an implementation I’ll tell you how to do it… you just need a bit of ajax experience.
Thanks a lot for dropping by, Kevin, and welcome ! I really appreciate your feedback as it contrasts with what I have done already in this weblog. All of the different social bookmarking sites that you see for each of the different weblog posts is not a service / offering that I get to use myself. Actually, that is the listing from the people I *do* know who read my weblogs (Internal and External) who are actually making use of whatever the bookmarking application. So I know that one way or another whenever people need to bookmark a site that small list of entries I have added is bound to belong to one of the regular readers based on feedback I have collected from them, or based on their preferences setup at their own weblogs and so forth.
In a way, it is just an opportunity for me to make it easier on folks expanding on making further use of their own tools while they get to read stuff I publish here in elsua. However, I agree with you that it would really neat to be able to make it stand out those social bookmarking tools that may be more popular than others and help entice people to try some of those. Alas I do not have any Ajax experience. Thus I am open to any suggestions from any of my readers out there 😉
Thanks again for the feedback !
Thanks for the tip! I’m going to give it a try (since my feedburner feed won’t let me add this functionality right now).
You are most welcome, Nels ! I hope it works just as well over at your weblog. I have been testing it out over here before I put it together and it worked really well. And since you are also using WordPress I cannot see a reason why it may not be able to work. Have a look and see how it would go. Good luck !
Thanks for the reference.
True, it’s not easy to choose which buttons to put, some have started to consider them as pollution (http://blogfresh.blogspot.com/2006/04/one-click-icons-losing-their-cool.html), personaly, while checking them out for the list I made, I have talked with some of the developers, they all of course have been thinking about each aspect much more than any average user, in some way it’s their baby, and when you follow their idea they all seem great.
I know I should stay only on the users side but knowing this makes choosing even harder.
Also I noticed that since I’ve posted those footer codes poeple have added them to their tools or blogs, which I hope will give more chance to other new social bookmarks. 🙂
You are most welcome ! Thank you for the additional feedback comments.
Actually, I faced a similar problem when I first added the code. I got through a whole bunch of different options and offerings and while going through them I just couldn’t make up my mind, so in the end what I did was to try to please the audience of this weblog and added the different offerings that not only have I been exposed to myself but also that I know (After asking few of the readers) others are using consistently. Then as time goes by people would be able to have other offerings to the list if they cannot see them right now by appending a comment over here or just letting me know offline. And so far it seems to be working pretty all right. At least, that is the initial feedback I have got from those who may have ventured into giving it a try.
Then from there to try to please everyone is perhaps a whole lot more difficult and something that I am not sure would be worth while pursuing unless it all gets cluttered and it loses its usefulness. However, as more and more start to notice my weblog it would be a natural change to update the buttons and add / remove accordingly in order to meet their needs. But that would go one step at a time. For the time being people would need to get ready to find the social bookmarking tool that meets their needs and from there onwards start spreading the word around and make some further changes. Time will tell.
Thanks again for the feedback and for dropping by !
SocialPoster.com is a service that lets you post a web page to numerous social bookmarking sites.
Hello Dan! Thanks a bunch for the feedback comments and for dropping by! Welcome to elsua! What an interesting Web site, indeed, and how easy it is to use. Fantastic find! Thanks for sharing it with us. I have just tried the bookmarklet and it works like a charm! I am surely going to be making use of it from now onwards. I really appreciate you sharing it with us as it is going to prove to be an interesting application. Hopefully plenty other folks would find it helpful as well.
Thanks again for the feedback!