Monthly Archives: October 2005

Bookmarklet: Technorati Tags in a Second

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Ok, so everybody loves bookmarklets – those little links you drag onto your favorites toolbar and click for instant results. There are lots of great ones out there, and I will write someday about my favorites, but I don’t want to get distracted. I want to post what I think is one of the single greatest bookmarklets out there right now – and one of the hardest to get. I don’t know why the original author of this bookmarklet took their entire website offline and used a robots.txt file to stop its contents from being saved almost anywhere, but here is…

The Technorati Tag Bookmarklet: BlogTags

Update: There has been some real confusion about how to use this bookmarklet. I’m sorry it wasn’t more clear. I’ve called it BlogTags, but you can call it what ever you want. Just hover your mouse over the words BlogTags in the previous sentence, press the mouse button and hold it down, then drag the link up to your toolbar. That’s the part of your browser just below the web adress of this page. If you can’t see a toolbar, go to View menu and select toolbar or favorites toolbar.

I love it. Drag that puppy up to your favorites toolbar and give it a click (or click on it here just to see what it does.) That code it spits out can by copied and pasted into the end of each blog post you write. I get people visiting my site through Technorati tag searches every day. You can put in the links to tag your blog posts manually, but this bookmarklet is a real time saver. I don’t know why Technorati doesn’t offer a bookmarklet like this themselves.

If you are unfamiliar with the space where the blogosphere and the tagosphere intersect, try clicking on some of the Technorati Tags at the ends of my posts here. You’ll find a whole world of other bloggers writing on the same subject.

See also: following up on the bookmarklet, my next post.

P.S. Curious how I was able to get this if the web site it came from is offline? The moment I first found it, I saved it in my Furl.net archive, which includes a cached copy automatically.

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Examining Power Dynamics and Web 2.0

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Conversation is ramping up about the dominance of white males in the emerging Web 2.0 world. Once place I’ve found the issues being discussed is over at the Mashable blog. What can be done? Here’s my two cents re steps that could help:

  1. Let’s prioritize bringing together the for-profit and non-profit worlds. There are so many proactive groups in the non-profit world working to shift power away from those with the most privilege. At the same time there are lots of people of color and women making careers both online and using the web as one of many tools. The folks over at are prioritizing bringing these two groups together. So if you’re in either sphere (biz or NPO) you might want to check them out.
  2. Let’s look to experts outside the “a-list” of bloggers to read, look to for advice, invite to speak and to provide assistance to. Mary Hodder’s great Speakers Wiki was created for just this purpose. It’s a directory of web folks from outside the white-male demographic.
  3. Search engines are notorious for reinforcing pre-existing privilege. While Google may have a huge index and powerful technology, check out social-recommendation enabled search engines like Wink. If we can find participants in ecosystems like that who have perspectives other than those of white men, then our searches will expose us to information that the dominant models might continue to marginalize. (I intend to write an in depth review of Wink later.)

Just thought I’d put in my two cents. I know I’m not interested in all these new web tools for their own sake, but for their usefulness in making the world a better place. I know that’s the case for a huge number of people online, including many readers of this site.

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Event: Web 2.0 at TechSoup.org

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Check out this announcement for an event I will be participating in later this month. I hope readers here will come and participate as well. Click on the names of the other moderators to see their blogs.

It’s happening in TechSoup, a five-day online event:

The Impact of Web 2.0 on the Nonprofit Community

Join CompuMentor’s community engagement program director John Lorance and a host of leading Web technology advocates as they demystify Web 2.0 technologies and illustrate how using new socially oriented technological innovations can help the nonprofit community. Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, social bookmarking and online social networks, blogging, content sharing through Wikis and RSS, and new Web widgets need not only be in the hands of well-funded developers; but also can be used by organizations to further their missions.

Co-hosts include:

• Marnie Webb of CompuMentor

• Ruby Sinreich two-time winner of “Best Blog” from The Independent Weekly

• Chris Messina of Flock and SpreadFireFox fame

• Marshall Kirkpatrick, trainer and educator on Web 2.0 technologies

• Phil Klein, nonprofit technologist of Pen and Pixel

• Alexandra Samuel, online community consultant with Social Signal

• Michael Stein, nonprofit technology blogger

• Yann Toledano, nonprofit technology consultant and TechSoup forum co-host.

• Eddie Codel, social networking technology advocate and Webzine conference organizer.

These leading voices of Web 2.0 technology will help you bring the ever-changing field of the second wave of Web applications and tools into practical focus. Event hosts will share their real-world stories, demystify the buzzwords, and provide resources. Discussion will focus on exploring the latest trends in Web publishing for all, effective online communications, emerging research and discovery methods, and collaboration tools.

This event will eliminate the buzz and bring into focus how nonprofits can use these tools to learn from other organizations’ Web travels. You will come away with practical tips, models, resources, and tools for bringing collaborative technologies and processes to your own organization.

Save the dates: October 24-October 28

Join us the week of October 24, for a free, five-day online event, in the TechSoup Emerging Technology forum www.techsoup.org/web2event as we discuss issues such as:

§ What do we mean by Web 2.0?

§ How can you use an RSS feed to get pushed information as well as to push your content to others?

§ What on earth is a Wiki? How is it better than the old-fashioned Web site?

§ What is tagging and how is it relevant? How can you learn from others’ Web searches?

§ What are widgets and how can these new tools help you solve age-old problems?

§ How can an online social network help your organization find volunteers?

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Attention: Treasure Chest of Snake Pit?

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An important, developing part of the online world that you should know about is what’s being called “attention.” It’s related to what you’d probably intuitively associate with the word. Attention-minded folks discuss the future of our “attention data.” Examples include:

  • Your click-stream, or web browsing history
  • Your bookmarks
  • Your online purchases
  • Your content posted and consumed (which podcasts have you listened to, how long did you spend on this blog, the tags you’ve applied to your photos online)

There’s a great potential for evil here – I don’t want the government watching where I go online (already being done to some folks, I’m sure), and I don’t want this data of mine to be controlled by some company that won’t let me grab it, use it or move it over into another company’s database. There’s a great potential for good in this data too, though. I would really like to know how I discovered all the web pages in my archive (the referring URLs) and I’d like to know how readers use the articles I post here on this blog (have you emailed this to someone else? Do you click on the links in my sidebar?). Much of that is already available, but the attention folks are working to make it more solid, easily accessed and usable.

Towards these ends, a great group called The Attention Trust is working to make sure that our interests as end users are protected. One of their projects is The Attention Trust Wiki. On that wiki (a web site that anyone can edit, like Wikipedia) I’ve started pages for an attention wishlist and a list of places you can read more. Check out the attention trust and their wiki. This is going to be very important stuff that you’ll hear about a lot in the coming years.

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Google’s Blog Search Thumps Yahoo!

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In the last few days Yahoo! has unveiled their Blog Search Engine and lots of people have been talking about the decision to put blogs in a little box on the side of their news search results. That’s not nearly as important to me as the following:

  • Indexes: Searching for “Web 2.0” in Yahoo! blog search brings 1,300+ results. Google’s new blog search engine offers 18,000 results. Additionally, many of Yahoo’s results appear to be items from peoples’ social bookmarking archives. That’s good that those are included, but it also inflates the numbers, as both blog posts and their appearance in archives appear to be included in Yahoo’s results. Compare these numbers with Technorati’s 16,000+ results and BlogPulse’s 9,000+ results.
  • Inbound Link Search: Yahoo Blog Search does nothing to improve the disappointing state of inbound link search of the blogosphere.
  • Supporting Multi-Media: Yahoo Blog Search results under “see more blog search results” offers Flickr image results, but Technorati brings back Flickr images as well as Buzznet photos, Del.icio.us and Furl bookmark archived items. My personal favorite, Tag Central pulls from many, truly multimedia search sources.

So I’m not too impressed with Yahoo’s blog search engine yet. I’ll probably use it allong with Google Blogsearch, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and BlogPulse, perhaps spliced together in one RSS feed per query via FeedDigest with duplicates removed.

I also think that Yahoo’s podcast directory is a bummer, if for no reason than that it appears you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download anything! You can listen through some proprietary Yahoo listener, but I’d like to put my podcasts on my “pod” – towards which they were cast. Much like Flickr’s new login procedure after being bought by Yahoo, it appears that the advertising we see upon visiting Yahoo isn’t enough – we must register to see even more ads. Users may as well just search inside the Libsyn directory and find plenty of easily downloadable podcasts.

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Furl Update

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After writing this post complaining about Furl.net, I talked to the CTO of LookSmart, Furl’s parent company, for quite awhile this morning. It was a great conversation about the tagosphere and Furl in particular. He was very open to hearing some thoughts about increasing the usability of Furl and bringing it more in tune with the best of Web 2.0. Sounds like serious changes are already underway. At the same time, he said it was a top priority to make their service as understandable to non-geeks as possible. I think that’s a great priority, so we’ll see if we can meet somewhere in the middle. That would be best for me, too, as few of my clients are super-geeky. Teaching them to use tools that are powerful, but easy to use, is ideal.

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