C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

wolfger invited me to StumbleUpon, so I joined. My username is MattArnold, so if you're on that service, let's please join networks! It does a lot of what I had hoped del.icio.us would do: Find other web surfers who like a lot of the same web pages that you do, and use that to channel-surf the best-reviewed other sites they like.

Although del.icio.us eventually tacked on a rudimentary feature for finding cool new pages through serendipity effects (by the way, I'm Matt_Arnold on del.icio.us so let's please join networks there as well), it's first and foremost a way to make and save bookmarks on the web, and add tags to them. It seemed to me that as long as so many people were doing this, it should be possible to search the data of everyone's tags and bookmarks and find people whose recommendations I would like. But instead the service focuses its excellence on helping you get to your own bookmarks from any computer, subscribe to anyone's bookmarks as an RSS feed, and conveniently tag pages with metadata for findability, better than StumbleUpon does.

That's why I was so pleased that I could import all my del.icio.us tagged sites, complete with their list of tags, into StumbleUpon. It now has a lot of information about my tastes, with which to automatically correlate me to others.

Although you may add del.icio.us buttons to your Firefox navigation bar that would bookmark and tag the page you're viewing, or bring up your bookmarks page, del.icio.us is a web service that works fine without those conveniences. StumbleUpon, by contrast, requires that you install a plugin for giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to pages, and doesn't work without it.

"There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck." --Outfoxed

brendand noticed in my last post that I applied tags to it. Tags are important. Google succeeded because they realized you can't hierarchically categorize the web like Yahoo tried to do. Unfortunately Google is getting inundated with people cheating its page-rank system. The web will soon depend on metadata, which usually takes the form of descriptive keyword tags. But the only people who can possibly apply them to 8 billion webpages is... everybody.

Who here does social bookmarking? Post here with your bookmark page so I can browse it. Mine is at http://del.icio.us/Matt_Arnold. del.icio.us is a service that lets you apply keyword tags to your favorite sites the way that Flickr has tags for pictures. You can browse the most popular bookmarks on the internet from day to day.

You can even set up the popular list as a drop-down menu from your bookmark toolbar in Firefox. (What? You're still using Explorer? No wonder your computer is infested with spyware/adware/viruses. Get Firefox! It is a thing of beauty.) Just like the web changed from something you browse into something you you search, now feeds are changing it to streams of delivered headlines that you subscribe to. Firefox has a feed-reader built-in: on a page that offers a feed, just click the orange button on the lower right corner of the browser to subscribe.

Another form of social websurfing is the Firefox extension Outfoxed. You get a new button on your interface that will let you rate a web domain as good, bad or dangerous. Your browser will access the reports of your friends who have the extension, so that a global network of votes and comments emerges.