Library clips

I do a lot of roundup posts as there is just too much to cover, but Buzka deserves a post of its own, ‘cause it’s kind of nifty and it’s local to me, being a Perth based company.

I found Buzka on TechCrunch via an authored post by Duncan Riley, who is Perth based, it’s great to have an insider representing our locality.

So what exactly is Buzka?

It’s social bookmarking, only you don’t tag your bookmarks, and it doesn’t look like del.icio.us for a change.

It’s more like a place to create and share your own private or public lists (called Spots) of anykind, usually on a topic, but you could use it to list a collection of:
- popular blog posts from your blog
- a blogroll
- your favourite podcasts or episodes
- your web office documents
- your favourite video clips
- etc…

Via the website or a bookmarklet you can add a bookmark and description to multiple Spots, your own and others (if you have been invited).

You get a user space, and each list you make has it’s own URL.

Here is a random user space, it’s divided into:
- Your own Spots
- Your contributed Spots
- Your Friends
- Groups
- Your comments
- People can leave you messages

So it’s basically “a social network for bookmarks collated in a list”, not sure why they have left tagging out of the design, this will come in handy to filter through lists in the future.

Here is a Spot on Perth Dining, notice on the left sidebar is the list of folders and bookmarks in this Spot, and the rest of the screen is a web view of the actual webpage.
I really like the idea of navigating web page collections from a sidebar, the first web page you will see at a Spot is the first bookmark.

You will notice that these bookmarks can also be organised into folders, kind of a list within a list, so within the Perth Dining Spot we have the sub-Spot of Big Night Out. At first I didn’t think this had a permalink, but if you right click on the name of the folder and open a new window, you get a dedicated page for a folder within a Spot, eg. Perth Dining > Cafes.
NOTE: Not sure if a single bookmark has it’s own permalink.

You can view the contents of a Spot a few different ways:
- Titles
- Titles with descriptions
- Thumbnails
- Headlines (not sure what this is?)

From a menu or links you can also jump to the about page of a Spot, leave and read comments, email a friend the Spot, and see what other Groups this Spot is shared.

Here is an example of a Group Spot, you will see:
- Spots that have been contributed to the group
- Group members
- the addition of a discussion forum

What a great idea for a simple Community of Practice, even better that a user is not restricted to a group, but can simply contribute their spot to a Group…the discussion forum is the group specific tool.

Really a group is a little more than a collection of Spots, or would Spots under a tag be more of a collection of Spots. I suppose a group is a moderated tag in a way, the group members decide what Spots are allowed in the Group, unlike an unmoderated tag which could get loaded within so many ambiguous and junk Spots.

My post on blog communities and Technorati community groups ponders on formal groups compared to tag dumping grounds.

I’ll be adding this post to my social list collection…hmm maybe my social collection post could be a Spot.

Another thing I noticed is that you can edit a Spot by drag ‘n dropping nodes in your Spot using an Outliner, or even create new folders…this could be an alternate view for a Spot, and even output to OPML.

Here’s my first Spot called Perth Web 2.0 services.

Since my Spot is a list of services, I’d like to create my own metadata like: review (point to blog posts that have reviewed this service), and features…maybe this type of content can be included in the description field.

See more more aussie web 2.0 stuff here.