Social Bookmarking

[UPDATE: Ma.gnolia is gone. See my comment on this post.]

Summary: Ma.gnolia is great!

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while now and have found it an invaluable service. However, it really isn’t a very collaborative tool, difficult to use in groups. You really need to set up an independent account for the group. “Networks” don’t seem to amount to much other than bookmarks of other users. Tags such as “for:otheruser” can only be viewed by that other user.

I’ve also looked at Connotea and found it to have some nice features. For publications DC metadata can be automatically extracted from CrossRef. It seems to work well with DOI/Handle persistent identifiers. With “Groups” you can explicitly say certain bookmarks are for certain groups. Unfortunately, you can’t say “publicly share this bookmark but not through my groups”, so all of your public and unassigned bookmarks show up in all of your groups. I’ve posted to the developers to add this security option.

The availability of RSS feeds from these bookmarking sites is fantastic. Suddenly you bookmarks are machine readable and you can do all sorts of nice things with tagging. You bookmarks can become an ontology of mappings from concept (the bookmark entry in RSS) to resource (the linked resource). All very semantic and RDF-like. However, over time sites and CMS’s changes and so do URL’s. In connotea the URL cannot be changed, so this would be a problem. Connotea feeds refer to the Connotea website and not the resource URL directly. In Del.icio.us the link URL is the identifier for the RSS entry, so if you changed the URL it looks like you’ve got a completely new entry. We need a persistent identifier (or URL’s) that can be used to identify the concept but redirect the URL to where it should go.

Only a little while ago I found Ma.gnolia and it looks like the solution I’ve been waiting for! What it has the others sometimes don’t:

• Links directly to the URL
• Persistent identifiers regardless of bookmark URL changes (granted, it’s a Ma.gnolia link)
• Much better collaborative/group tagging
• Access control with private tags, public tags, your tags in groups, and group tags not in your tags, private groups, publicly readable groups, publicly contributable groups
• ranking
• Atom, RSS, OPML, JSON, configurable microformats
• OpenID authentication
• Saved copies of websites (however, not publicly viewable)

The real problem now is that all of these solutions are not interoperable. Sure, I can import my bookmarks from one to the other, but there is no way I can use my Ma.gnolia account to contribute bookmarks to a Del.icio.us tag-set or a Connotea group.