Slashdot Bookmarks

Recently we've added a new bookmark function that logged in users can use to maintain public lists of URLs for tagging and sharing with the world. You can read the bookmark faq to answer a few specific questions, check out the global bookmark lists that can be tagged, journaled over, or submitted as stories. Read on for notes on what we're planning for this.

The idea is that URLs are bookmarked, either using the javascript bookmarklett thingee or by directly visiting the bookmarks page. But when you are DONE bookmarking and tagging your URL, you can then write a journal or story submission about them. On a related note, journals are now directly submittable to Slashdot editors as well.

We plan to add RSS exporting as well as a few other features, but mostly what we're going to try to do is figure out ways to mine bookmarks for stories. You can best help by tagging bookmarks on the global bookmarks pages. This is all very experimental, so your help is appreciated.

Now as always on Slashdot we appreciate your feedback and bug reports. You can do this the slashdot SF project page. Or even better you could visit the site and consider submitting patches. Ideas are never in short supply here- time to code them all ALWAYS is. Join the mailing list! Or just start bookmarking and tagging stuff. Lastly, thanks to Tim Vroom who put all of this together.

update to clarify a point for the readers- this system is primarily an extension of our submission bin. You are welcome to bookmark & tag for your own pleasure, but our intent is that this system eventually be used to help us find content for the mainpage. So of course the functionality has overlap with other sites. No huge shock there. But our intentions is to use user bookmarks & tags as another input channel for editors picking stories for the audience.

Let me be the first

to say that I'm glad dupe and spell check have been added.

Re:Let me be the first

to say that I'm glad dupe and spel check have been added.

Google Bookmarks

Isn't this pretty much the same sorta thing as http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ [google.com] ?

Just seems like a nice way for a site to get it's users to index the internet for it..

Blog ?

How is it too different from a blog thingee ?

Re:Blog ?

How is it too different from a blog thingee ?

Bah, you don't get it, do you? This is all about MINDSHARE! After Mindshare you get Innovation. And, after Innovation, you get Web Traffic. And, after Web Traffic, you get Dupes!

It may not make sense now, but one day, young grasshopper, you will understand. Now, where did I put my percosets?

Redundancy

Ok, and we should use this instead of del.icio.us why, exactly? Might be good to put on the FAQ list.

Re:Redundancy

Because Slashdot's got a midly less annoying domain name?

Great New Idea!

This is absolutely del.icio.us!!

http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

Re:Great New Idea!

Exactly, all this is doing is splitting the online bookmarks sharing market into even smaller and smaller silos, subtracting value from end users. Why doesn't Slashdot just work out a deal with del.icio.us so that Slashdotters can mark the fact that they have a Slashdot account in their del.icio.us preferences, and then have those bookmarks be minable by the Slashdot editors. That way it would be easier for the Slashdot editors, better for del.icio.us, and would actually add value to the Internet instead of further splintering the market.

Re:Great New Idea!

Your analogy is broken because Firefox doesn't take advantage of the network effect. The more people that use a particular online social bookmarking service, the more value there is for each user. I'm not saying there shouldn't be different approaches, but it would be nice if there was some sort of standard so that they could interoperate with each other.

I Can Dig It

This will be a great new way for Slashdot users to dig [digg.com] for what others find interesting!

Suggestion

Mentioning digg here isn't trolling or flamebait. But you could have provided a constructive comparison of /.'s new bookmarks to digg. Example:

* Digg links gain popularity through votes. It seems /.'s links are like del.icio.us. The more people add a link the more popular it'll be.
* Digg's whole site is based on link popularity. Slashdot has article posts still moderated by humans. The bookmarks are simply another source of information.
* Slashdot has a community of people who flag each other as friends and foes, read each others' journals, etc. Digg is full of only random meaningless comments.

Wow

Let me be the first to say: I find this to be a delicious new feature!

Benefits

It seems the primary benefit is to help slashdot find good articles to post about. For bookmark management and sharing there are plenty of other places to go. However many here do read each others journals, so maybe this will turn more into a community of bookmarks instead of delicious' million random links. I guess I'm saying it has the potential to be a more social system since /. has such a large community.

Tags?

I've seen them for about a day when they were first introduced, after that they are gone. What happened to them?

(and yes, I've got them enabled in my preferences)

This needs a better name.

I think we should call it Sla.shd.ot.

Slash.icio.us?

While most posts will complain that this is too similar to http://del.icio.us/ [del.icio.us] why not figure out a way to partner with del.icio.us so that there could be something like http://slash.icio.us/ [slash.icio.us] where people could create bookmarks that would appeal to the Slashdot crowd?

I use del.icio.us because it's easy and it works, plus there's already a ton of relevant links to find anytime I'm doing research on something (it's far more tageted and 'prescreened' than google) so I could see it as a natural extention of the "News for nerds" mantra.

To CmdrTaco

It's nice that you're adding features, but could you repeal the permanent mod point bans on some of us? There are people here who read and contribute and would like to moderate but never get a chance. I don't want to create another userid and wait another six months until it "matures".

Just give us back our occasional mod points, and maybe explain what we did wrong which caused them to be taken away in the first place.

And also, could you please add a place where we can discuss this very sort of thing and not be modded offtopic?

This site depends on its users. I'm a user. You're supposed to listen to me.

Holy Web 2.0 Batman!

First CSS now meta tagging and community bookmarks. Whats next!? Will I wake up coffee in hand only to find /. all AJAXed out with satellite imagery and SlashSpace personal pages with photosharing!?? I feel like I am really riding Web 2.0 into the future.

I have an idea

In your date formats, include the year. I never know which of two articles is the dupe unless I pull out a calendar to see what year has the article date falling on a Monday/Thursday/whatever.

Re:I have an idea

In your date formats, include the year.

You can change this in your preferences, under "Homepage." I use the "Sun Mar 21, '99 10:00 AM" setting myself.

Public vs. private bookmarking

This and delicious may be great for making site suggestions to the masses (or promoting your own site), but how about when you want bookmarking to actually be useful? I've been using http://www.ifaves.com/ [ifaves.com] a lot and find it great for personal private bookmarking. Set it as my home page, auto-login, use their bookmarklet for adding new pages, and it saves me a ton of time trying to remember what sites I want to revisit, plus lets me share bookmarks with friends without having to do it up in an email.

Top 10 bookmarks

• 10. Mod +5 annoying [digg.com]
• 9. New features [slashdot.org]
• 8. Reasons to use Linux [microsoft.com]
• 7. Boycott RIAA [boycott-riaa.com]
• 6. Slashdot dating handbook [soultrek.net]
• 5. Cowboy Neal vs Godzilla [googlefight.com]
• 4. Cringely [pbs.org]
• 3. Dvorak [pcmag.com]
• 2. Portman and Hot Grits [google.com]
• 1. Goatse.cx [goatse.cx]Goatse.cx

Half an hour to read one post!!!!!!

Even more ways to waste my time, thank you Slashdot.!

Wait a minute...

...you mean there's other websites? Besides Slashdot? I've been doing this since 1999 and noone let me know?!?!

Should help reduce dupes

Ideally this'll be set up so when an editor goes into the submission bin stories are grouped according to the relationship they have to each other (5 stories pointing to the same link, for instance) and the best one can be chosen. Later if any other stories come in it will show that the link has already been used, and they can either be rejected or put aside for the occasional slashdot follow up link story.

In the end, this is a feature for the editors, not a general bookmarking service.

-Adam

Feature request

How about giving us the ability to remove and/or modify in any way the tags we've already made. These aren't ephemeral comments that go away after a day or two, they're long term displays.

Give us some power over our own work please. Some of us work like Slashdot editors, with a tendency toward dupes and typos.

This is old!

Old news! Slashdot has had bookmarks for ages!

Submitter must be pretty badly out of the loop.

Bah!

All I really want is to be able to bookmark comments and articles with one click. Kuro5hin/Scoop has had this feature (named Hotlist) for years, and has allowed me to keep track of my favorite articles.

Edit? Delete?

How do I edit or delete bookmarks I've added??

rss

this site specific news should have been seperated from main RSS feed.

Usefullness/Feature Request...

Hi Slashdot Editors & Mods, I like the idea that tags give a way to codify information based on small words with commonly accepted meanings. My Feature request would be that clicking on a tag didn't edit the tag, but brought up a list of global bookmarks or articles with that tag. So let me click on the 'anime' tag and get a list of people's 'anime' tagged bookmarks. I want the tags to be a search feature. I think this would make the tags even more usefull.

Also, how are "Popular" bookmarks figured out? By the number of people bookmarking the same site, or by the number of people following the link?

--Donald

Easy Bookmarking

I'd prefer a much simpler UI. The "Related Links" box at the bottom of the right column of boxes next to the story summary, should have checkboxes next to each "related link". And a text field into which URLs can be drag/dropped, copy/pasted or typed.

A really nice UI would add a "Slashdot bookmark" item to the right-click context menu, so I can add any link to that box by right-clicking and selecting that item.

Let's use a 'frontpage' tag!!!

So that, they'll know we want THAT to go to the frontpage... Best of two worlds!! We could have in the frontpage the "omelette" (if you have read the FAQ you know what i'm talking about), and at the same time, the most tagged stories/bookmarks from readers!

Import

Now if they can only add import to google-bookmarks

Re:Change this also......

So how often you read book from the end to the beginning?

Re:Change this also......

The newest comments should by default be the first thing you see, with the oldest aka 1st post at the bottom of the page.

Except that you'll end up with a series of comments that don't make a lot of sense until you wade through them all to the end, and have to go back and read them all again.

...

Why would you make hundreds of changes before checking it out anyway? How would you know which change caused your table to move too far to the right?

...

It's not trivial if you're a student, trying to save money where you can.

...

In the end, the cost is trivial.

...

Are you kidding me? Not only should you be doing multiple changes at once (instead of rebooting every time you change padding:1px to padding:2px), but now you don't have to purchase two computers just to test your page!

...

Apple's new BootCamp is useless for web design because you'd have to spend all of your time rebooting your computer just to see the changes you made to your CSS files.

Ahhh, so that's how it all ties together!

Re:Change this also......

while you're at it, lose this whole mod thing, my sig used to read: If I had 4 friends that frequented /. I too could be modded up to "5 Distracting!"

Re:Here are a couple of bookmarks for ya

I'm going to walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico

Actually, that would make for a very interesting documentary. My guess is that anybody attempting this experiment will be tossed into a Mexican prison on relatively short order.

Re:Here are a couple of bookmarks for ya

The children of immigrants always speak English. The immigrants themselves may have trouble with English, but that's because it's very hard to learn a foreign language past a certain age(Did your parents take a foreign language during high school or college? Do they still remember it?), but the children, raised here, will know English better than the native language of wherever their parents come from. Always. My Latin teacher's father came here from Italy(during the times when Italian immigrants were much more common, and Italians and the Irish took the place Mexicans take today), and he only knows Italian from the things he's tried to teach himself from textbooks. I'll bet one of your ancestors came here from another country, or are you a Native American? The US has always been a nation of immigrants, and as much as you looked to find the one quote from a Founding Father which can be strained in a hugely incorrect way to be anti-immigrant, we have always been a nation of immigration(although the people have always hated immigrants, for the same reasons even) Don't like immigration? I'd say to go to somewhere else, but then you'd be an immigrant there. Immigrants didn't destabilize the US economy any of the other times, they won't destabilize it today.