Furl and del.icio.us have lots of company- there seems to be no end in sight for the number of new sites offering a place for social bookmarking. I have just added two new tools of note (for a total of 15!) to my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool which allows you to select which services you use and be able to do one click posting via a custom bookmarklet tool.
The tools and some more then detailed narrative how I tumbled into them…
* Scuttle, which is the main public site for the open source social bookmark tool that allows web site owners to build their own social bookmark sites. I found this as I followed a trackback on a recent entry to something at Todd’s Big IDEA blog at Zane State College.
And this connection would not really had been possible if I were one of the purists who thinks comments ought to be turned off 😉
Rummaging among his links in the sidebar (a hobby of mine for the sake of web serendipity) I came across first the college-wide blog service at Zane State using Blojsom. Then I found he has written an excellent newbies guide to RSS, Countdown To RSS. But then buried down in the bottom of his sidebar, I noticed a “scuttled” heading from a scuttle site hosted at Zane State. It appears Todd is syndicating his scuttled bookmarks to his blog. Nicely down.
It was a quick Google to land on the main Scuttle, create an account, and peek at the JavaScript of their bookmark tool. The only feature I added was passing any highlighted text in the web page being scuttled to be inserted into the description field on the scuttle form (that was a toal guess that it would work).
And to come full circle, I had apparently furled Scuttle in late March!
Bottom Line: A local instance of Scuttle might be useful in an educational environment where you may want a smaller social network than say ever Yahoo who creates a del.icio.us account… especially for doing some group aggregation. I’ll have to keep this one more actively bookmarked in that place I call my mind.
* Jots Tim Yang had emailed a few weeks ago letting me know about Jots and asking it be added to the Bookmark tool mix. I just quickly created an account and played around, but it has quite a few slick features including:
- Import bookmarks from browser or del.ici.ous (though I could not follow the Jots instructiosn for exporting from del.icio.us)
- Tags
- Ability to create private groups “Bookmarks that are posted with privileged tags are viewable only by those users who are members of a privileged group.”
- APIs to post content to blogs “Jots has the ability to make a daily post to your blog consisting of all of your bookmarks from the previous day. An XML-RPC interface that supports the Blogger, MetaWeblog, or MoveableType API is required.”
- Notes- More or less the ability to store notes by creating an entry that lacks a URL… have to think about that one but it has some potential as a group tool.
It also looks like peeking at the source of their posting form that Jots is using some sort of AJAX service perhaps to check for existing URLs.
Wow, the cool tools just keep rolling out!
