One of the talk was about [...] No related posts.]]> http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2008/10/13/my-first-2-talks-available-online-tags-21st-century-democracy/feed/ 0 http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2006/03/24/the-new-project-tagbay-tagging-e-bay/ http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2006/03/24/the-new-project-tagbay-tagging-e-bay/#comments Fri, 24 Mar 2006 16:18:37 +0000 Pietro http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2006/03/24/the-new-project-tagbay-tagging-e-bay/ It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last [...] Related posts:

1. No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...
2. My new homepage Recently I have made some serious changes to my homepage. SOme of those changes I have been planning from a long long time. Others were more sudden. The central page is of course at pietrosperoni.it that leads to home.pietrosperoni.it. But then there was something that I wanted to do for a long time. Integrate my [...]...

Being the first bookmarking service from Italy, Fabio understood the importance and the frustration that comes from getting pages in a language different than your own, and that potentially you don’t understand. So he integrated in the bookmarking services the meta information “language�. The value of it being generally guessed by the program (don’t ask me how) but such that you can overwrite. And of course this meant giving to users the possibility to search only for pages in a certain language. But not only this, Smarking can itself work in different languages, meaning that all the messages can appear in different languages. For now just in Italian (and obviously English). But I know some others are arriving (my guess being Spanish, German and French). If you consider that right now if someone wants a bookmarking service he has to wrestle with English, and if you think that many Italians are really not that happy with that, you might understand the business potentiality of this decision.

Also, (and who can appreciate better than me that), when you look at who have bookmarked a page, you get the whole tag cloud. Yess! He also promised me that eventually he will release and API that for each page returns the full tag cloud. Which, I think, is also very important. From a visual prospective, I would say that it managed to bring home delicious’ lesson in simplicity. One of the things I did not like in many other bookmarking services was the size of the everpresent logo. And how much useful space is being used for the everpresent banner header. Spurl is the perfect example for this. Well, Smarking, like delicious, but also like Simpy does not make this error. The service is geared toward a more young audience than many other bookmarking services. Maybe for Fabio’s young age, too (he just ended graduated), the service contains many social tools. From the ability to friend a user, see who friended you and send messages to a user. I don’t, personally see the importance of those tools, as I prefer to have all my messages just reach me by email. And cut the middleman. But teenagers everywhere love them. Smarking also let you vote on (on the standard 1 to 5 stars scale), how good each link is. Another quite useless feature, but again I know I am in the minority on this. What instead is really interesting, and the reason why I might actually consider to pass to smarking myself (yes, I know, I am still using del.icio.us, shame on me), is for the possibility, when you bookmark a page, to ask the service to check it for you, and tell you when the content changes. Think about it, this is so important. Any page that you need to keep an eye on; every blog that has no rss feed (yes, there are some); you just add it here and receive a message when it has changed. Quite useful I would say.

For the rest, the service is still in its infancy. I know that Fabio waited to go live until he could clear all the important bug. Other differences include the possibility to write as much text as you like when describing a website. Making it more useful for those that see social bookmarking as a form of blogging. It is also possible to download your bookmarks from del.icio.us or from an xml file (this I insisted that it was included). And there is a tracker-wiki for further development, and a blog for announcements.

All together a good work I would say. It has some extra possibilities (like the language meta information and the possibility to keep an eye on a page) that I think eventually will become mainstream in social bookmarking services. It is probably a bit overloaded of tools, and social possibilities. But then again, I too asked Fabio if he could implement a system to let me discover users is Smarking who were female, over 18, from Europe, and interested in Taoism, Go and Bioinformatics. And he still have to get back to me on that. So maybe all those social tools might not be that unwelcome.

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I have been hearing a lot of talk on how users should not use too many tags in linking to url. I also am the maintainer of the mindmap maker, and I often look at some [...] Related posts:

1. No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

1. No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

I also said that:

Not only we could study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated [...] Related posts:

1. No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...

As correctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman tag clouds are becoming more and more popular. Yet [...] Related posts:

1. No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...