Slashdot Bookmarks

Recently we've added a new bookmark function that logged in users can use to maintain public lists of URLs for tagging and sharing with the world. You can read the bookmark faq to answer a few specific questions, check out the global bookmark lists that can be tagged, journaled over, or submitted as stories. Read on for notes on what we're planning for this.

The idea is that URLs are bookmarked, either using the javascript bookmarklett thingee or by directly visiting the bookmarks page. But when you are DONE bookmarking and tagging your URL, you can then write a journal or story submission about them. On a related note, journals are now directly submittable to Slashdot editors as well.

We plan to add RSS exporting as well as a few other features, but mostly what we're going to try to do is figure out ways to mine bookmarks for stories. You can best help by tagging bookmarks on the global bookmarks pages. This is all very experimental, so your help is appreciated.

Now as always on Slashdot we appreciate your feedback and bug reports. You can do this the slashdot SF project page. Or even better you could visit the site and consider submitting patches. Ideas are never in short supply here- time to code them all ALWAYS is. Join the mailing list! Or just start bookmarking and tagging stuff. Lastly, thanks to Tim Vroom who put all of this together.

update to clarify a point for the readers- this system is primarily an extension of our submission bin. You are welcome to bookmark & tag for your own pleasure, but our intent is that this system eventually be used to help us find content for the mainpage. So of course the functionality has overlap with other sites. No huge shock there. But our intentions is to use user bookmarks & tags as another input channel for editors picking stories for the audience.

Comments

Google Bookmarks

[neoform]

Isn't this pretty much the same sorta thing as http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ ?

Just seems like a nice way for a site to get it's users to index the internet for it..

Re:Google Bookmarks

[lysergic.acid]

You seem to have completely missed the point. Tags aren't an alternative to text searches. They're an alternative to conventional categorization. Meta tag overloading isn't really a problem in most tag system implementations, and by the success of del.icio.us, it seems to be a very effective organizational system for web content. You can still do a text search on the collection, but tags give a more intuitive way of grouping related articles together using the benefits of folksonomy, which increase with the the size of the userbase. So Slashdot's implementation of tags seems to be very appropriate.

I stumbled across the above link while exploring LibraryThing as part of the research I've been conducting for a network library application I'm developing. I was looking for a way to categorize/catalog the ebooks in a virtual library and found conventional catagorization techniques to be inappropriate for a virtual collection. Genre hierarchies seemed inadequate for a collection not limited by physical restrictions. Most books tend to belong in multiple categories, and many subcategories have more than one obvious parent category. Tags seemed to be the perfect solution to the problem as it did not rely on a specific view of how things should be categorized and used a more web-like structure rather than the rigid hierarchical structure of conventional classification systems. This is also more in line with the web's overall structure where all the nodes are interconnected by hyperlinks in a folksonomic organization.

I would recommend reading that article and doing some more research on folksonomy before you dismiss the practical benefits of tagging as opposed to alternative organization methods.

I Can Dig It

[cybrpnk2]

This will be a great new way for Slashdot users to dig for what others find interesting!

Re:It's been dugg

[truthsearch]

And the very first comment on that post is the perfect example of why I don't like digg. For 11 minutes now this comment is still visible:

wrong board

marked as spam /. sucks

On /. that would have been modded to nothing in 10 seconds. Plus the article isn't spam.

Re:I have an idea

[Laur]

In your date formats, include the year.

You can change this in your preferences, under "Homepage." I use the "Sun Mar 21, '99 10:00 AM" setting myself.