One of the cooler functions of social bookmarking and rating systems is that the story can come from anyone. I posted a link to del.icio.us last night on Front Row running in the wild on Mac Minis and pretty much any other system and today it’s running as the second most popular story / link. This is cool since it means quite a few people are tracking on the same stuff, but more so since it means we can all contribute to the items that are interest. I’m not exactly an A-List blogger and this story still pushed to the top within a pretty wide array of new items and within a very short period of time.
Social systems like Digg and potentially Ma.gnolia
Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, popular, social bookmarking, digg
I completely agree with you on the value of social bookmarking. In addition to showing the most popular sites over the past few days, one can also show what the community deems most important over all. Here is an example of this:
http://www.blinklist.com/tag/design/
If you get the chance to check out BlinkList, I would love to hear your thoughts since we are working hard at making our service better and better. Mike
PS: Our support for th mac is not yet great. I will be the first to admit that. We are working on it.
Knowing that anyone can spark a little wildfire of interest around a site is part of the appeal for people who don’t happen to already be established web personalities. This bubble-up phenomenon of stories from blogs and just web users in general suddenly taking off is something that is slowly getting better, but has a long way to go. I think that as social bookmarking, blogs and RSS evolve together, something will emerge that makes sure the things worthy of our attention get noticed. What Mike points to over at BlinkList serves up a lot of quick glances at what has peoples’ interest and that makes for a kind of community zeitgeist. It’s cool.
Seeing what is popular is one thing, but it doesn’t seem to me that it goes far enough. There’s certainly the benefit of serendipity, but seeing what is popular and in the scope of your interests goes a step further. That’s all about having a personal context, something we’re building into Magnolia through a number of means.
And yes, FrontRow looks really sweet, even on non-G5 computers. As a Mac-heavy team, we’re often left drooling by what those folks at Apple come up with.
Thanks for reading and for the thoughts guys…