Library clips

The makers of Pluck have introduced a folksonomy systems called Shadows.

Pluck (Personal Web Information Center) does have it’s own bookmarking component, but I don’t think this is a social feature.
I wonder if the intention is for Shadows, to replace this feature, why have both when they can do the same thing (just choose private/public), saving bookmarks could be similar, but to then organise and manage them you could click on the Shadows tab.

I guess this may be similar to the more personal Yahoo! My Web 1.0, and more social Yahoo! My Web 2.0.

Rojo has incorporated a folksonomy into its RSS Reader, that is, the personal save items folder is augmented for sharing and discovery (the folksonomy way).

BlogBridge has also followed this path…even moreso allowing you to incorporate other existing folksonomies.

I do like the clean interface and presentation of Shadows, and also the way it collates information such as comments.

Front page

Lists the most recent bookmarks by the community and top 5 popular pages.

Search box – I think it just searches in the tag field.

The sidebar lists the top 5 tags and top commenters

…it also has a box of ubertags which are like proprietary tags, it says that when you tag a page check if you can assign an ubertag from the list, like “celebrity, gadget”…it’s kind of like formalising a tag, and a way for the Shadow makers to say to the community, hey if you ever find something about a celebrity can you please tag it with celebrity amongst the other tags you apply, this way this tag can be a user-defined topic list of webpages on celebrities.

As users we can only do this within our own community, nptech is a tag shared by users of del.icio.us, the more people know about this the more popular it becomes, and soon it could become a one-stop shop for nptech stuff (more relevant and concise than using Google), I wonder if these community pioneered tags would be elevated to ubertag status and have a permanent position on the front page.

Tag page

When you click on a tag it clearly shows the narrow tags (other tags used with this one…like the “+” function in del.icio.us, but more so it shows, along the top, the top users of that tag.

…although it doesn’t show a list of related tags.

It also lacks what Blinklist lacks, and that is clicking on “10 users have also tagged this page” to see how many times a URL has been tagged, and to further view all the user accounts…although as just mentioned before it does show an excerpt of the top users of a tag along the top.

URL page (shadow page)

On a second look if you click view shadow page on an item, it goes to a permanent URL for that page, so it does have one, but it still doesn’t list hyperlinks of all the users and their tags used, it only has text that says “tagged by 8 people”, “total tags - 38”, “total comments – 1”
I really like this layout I just wish these statistics were hyperlinked for further discovery.
Actually on further observation I notice that on the sidebar it lists hyperlinks for top tags for this bookmark and under each tag a hyperlink that goes to a tag cloud of the users who have used this tag.
It also has most active users, but I don’t know if this is for this bookmark or just a general thing.

Now del.icio.us does this by listing common tags on the sidebar, but it lacks to list common users.
But what del.icio.us does is it displays a running list recording each time the same bookmark has been saved (even including the date), this is where you can access the common users (although this would be handy to be organised on the sidebar like Shadows…well on Shadows only the number is listed, you have to link to another page that shows the list or tag cloud), the extra mile del.icio.us goes is that you can access the tag/s within the users account with out having to go to the user account first, allowing more discovery and insight (also saving one click)…also by scrolling down this list you can view the comments made on each instance of the bookmark.

Shadows handles their information differently as it lists all the comments in it’s own section, and also, like Connotea, allows you to add a comment.
Not sure if this is anonymous or you need an account, and not sure if you have to already have saved this bookmark yourself.

So most of the functionality is there but it is delivered and organised in a different way.

There is also a box to tag the page you are on so you can add it to your own collection, although you can only add this bookmark from the shadow page you can’t do it from the tag page, where as in del.icio.us you can “copy item” from the tag page and also from the URL page (“and 8 other people”).

Then there is a second URL page for a bookmark that you can launch to by clicking on “site summary”…seems like this page is too similar, the only difference is that it lists all webpages bookmarked within a domain.
So if I click on a bookmark of a blog home page, it will also show bookmarks of all posts from this blog (Spurl has this feature), if this were to generate an RSS feed you could find out whenver someone bookmarks any page from your blog…Durl does this for del.icio.us but you would need the RSS for every blog post, it doesn’t do it at the domain level.
…although if your blog home page has also the hostname you will get bookmarks by all blog pages from other blogs using this host.

User page

Shows the recent items and also viewing by tag on the sidebar, a unique feature is it also collates all the comments made on all bookmarks, with a link to the bookmark on each comment.
Although when I visited a user page and I clicked on one of their tags, it went to the general page of all users for that tag, not within one particular user…hmmm.

Also when you browse their bookmarks it doesn’t show which tags are applied, unlike the way it is shown on the homepage…hmmm.