This is an unconventional post:

1. It is long—and reads more like a published article than a typical blog entry

2. For readers of my subscription-based journal, The Information Advisor, it serves as an online supplement to the March 2007 Knowledge Management Supplement article “Social Bookmarking as a Knowledge Management Strategy”

3. On April 15th, one month from today, as an experiment on this blog, I will share that full article, which also contains a detailed feature comparison chart of both fee-based and free social bookmarking vendors and sites here on Intelligent Agent

So—here we go.

In the March 2007 Information Advisor “Knowledge Management” supplement I discussed how social book-marking can be used as a means to share knowledge and find internal expertise—in other words to facilitate knowledge management in an organization. I also examined and profiled two leading fee based vendors that have launched a product specifically designed for enterprise use: ConnectBeam and Cogenz

In that article, though I also discussed how certain free, public social bookmarking sites could also be suitable for enterprise use—IF—they offered a “groups” function. In other words: the ability to create your own customized group where you could share your bookmarks within a own defined group—such as a workforce team, department, project team, or any other defined group. That article provided a list of social bookmarking firms that fit that criteria, and included a detailed feature comparison chart (to be published here next month). Those free social bookmarking sites that fit my criteria for potential enterprise use are:

• BlinkList
• BlueDot
• Delicious
• Diigo
• Magnolia
• Simpy
• Shadows

I also noted that I would post a textual description of each of these sites here on this blog—and that is what IA readers (and blog only readers) will find here today in this posting. Note that I have made an exception and added one more site that does not include a groups creation feature—Furl—because it is significant in another key way. See the write up below.

I have also given grades to each of these public social bookmarking sites, and those grades are given on what I feel are the four most important criteria for a social bookmarking sites’ applicability to internal/enterprise searching:

1. Group function capability. How easy is it to create a new group? Can the group remain private? Other group features?

2. Research value. How much of a page can be saved; are there advanced and precision search features?

3. Design/Interface/Ease of Use. Is it a pleasant experience to view and use the site? Does it show evidence of being intelligently thought out and designed?

4. Fully Featured. In the Knowledge Management supplement, I focused on these features:

• Ability to create an RSS Feed
• Surfacing of “related tags”
• Surfacing of “related users”
• Tag suggestions
• Tag cloud
• Import/export bookmarks
• Ability to crate larger “topics” or hierarchical categories

Here below are the results of my signing up and testing each of these free sites. The averaged grade for each is listed at the top of the list by its name, with a specific breakdown at the end. Remember: these grades are in the context of what is valuable for researchers, and particularly business researchers in an enterprise.

Here also are the rankings of the top performers, based on grade averages, from 1.0 - 4.0:

Diigo 3.85
Magnolia 3.75
BlinkList 3.675
BlueDot 3.4
Simpy 3.275
Del.icio.us 3.2
Furl 3.12 (grade lowered significantly for no group creation function)
Shadows 3.075

And the details, in alphabetical order with the final grade at the top.

BlinkList 3.675 (A-)

I liked using BlinkSpace. Everything here was set up simply and elegantly. There is a carefully created feature for creating private groups called “BlinkList Spaces”. BlinkList is a full featured site, and does what it says it does, and carries out its mission well. Although it’s not clearly stated, you can use + for AND as a Boolean operators in your searches of your list or the public lists (the syntax is a bit unconventional and awkward for OR: A|B and for NOT: A!B);
and while BlinkList will search just on the tag field as a default; it is supposed to search the fulltext of the notes and titles if a tag is not found–an okay but imperfect solution to fielded searching.

My grades:

Group Function Capability:A
Research Value: B
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A-
Fully Featured: A

Blue Dot 3.4 (B+)

I also like Blue Dot, and for several reasons. It made capturing pages quite an elegant process—a summary of the captured page was automatically inserted into the text field, and an image from the page was also captured to provide a nice thumbnail. It also had a very nice tag suggest feature that automatically suggested tags as you were entering your own terms while tagging a page.

From an enterprise use standpoint, BlueDot makes it possible to set up private groups by inviting “friends”, so you can form your own team or workgroup.

Another strength of Blue Dot was its emphasis on the social side of saving bookmarks, to help users find “friends” and subscribe to their bookmarks; it also provides extra options for sharing bookmarks, as users can choose from 4 permission levels for any “Dot” they share: Public, Share with Friends only, Keep Private for myself, or even share with a specific subset of my friends (e.g., just my family, or just my co-workers).

BlueDot also has recently introduced a new service, Blue Dot Buzz, which does data mining of the activity of users in your friends’ networks, and to find the most popular Dots being shared and talked about in just about any category.

My Grades:

Group Function Capability: B+
Research Value: B+
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A
Fully Featured: B

Del.icio.us 3.25 (B/B+)

The granddaddy of the social bookmarking sites has economies of scale going for it—in other words, you’re more likely to find other people tagging the same page, and surface others with similar interests because of the size of the user community. One of the best features it offers for researchers is that the fullsite is keyword searchable, including the description, notes, and tags, using advanced search features.

On the down side, creating groups is not an elegant process (you need to tag your bookmarks with for:username) which is an imperfect solution; and you can’t easily mark bookmarks as private or public when you save a page.

My Grades:

Group Function Capability: B-
Research Value: B+
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: B+
Fully Featured: A-

Diigo 3.85 (A/A-)

Diigo is by far the most fully featured social bookmarking site in this list, and offers several unique capabilities. The most notable feature is that users can highlight text right on the page, as well as make annotations via a “sticky note” for later viewing.

There are also other very useful features. I particularly liked the sophisticated and advanced search option for doing a keyword search of one’s own or public bookmarks. On that page you can limit a search by a phrase, and restrict a search to a URL, title, comments or highlights. You can even search “on” specific users as well

Note that when you place a “sticky note” to comment on a page for your later viewing, that note is viewable by anyone else in the Diigo community that views that page too! .

There are some other interesting and unique features on Diigo. For instance, when highlighting a word on any page with Diigo’s bookmarking tool, a drop down menu automatically appears that allows users to search for that highlighted word on various search engines, social bookmarking sites; blogs, on the active site and more. I also had much more control in formatting when saving a page; and had an option to forward the page to another person as well.

What about the all important group feature? Well, Diigo rounds out its offerings very nicely by just this month launching its “Groups” function. That feature looks to be a clear and elegant way to allow anyone to set up a private environment for sharing your bookmarks. Ultimately, if you combine the Web annotation capabilities with the ability to share in groups, Diigo has created a very enterprise friendly social bookmarking service. And, according to a spokesperson at the firm, this Groups function is “just the first of many more advanced group collaboration functions that we will be introducing in several phases” So we look forward to staying tuned!

My Grades:

Group Function Capability: A
Research Value: A-
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A-
Fully Featured: A-
(only missing “related users” and “larger topics”)

Furl 3.15 (B)

Furl offers a capability that’s extremely valuable for researchers that no other site here offers: the ability to save and archive not just a URL or snippet, but the entire page. However, it is also the only vendor that has not enabled a “group” function.

So from a researcher’s standpoint, there’s a lot to like about Furl. Not only can you save all those Web pages into your personal archive, but you can then perform advanced searching of their fulltext so that when you are trying to find a page on the Web, but only remember a small part of it, you can search the fulltext to find it. Your keywords are even highlighted in the pages your search pulls up. And because you are asked to assign “topic” words (tags) to each page you search, you can also limit your search just by “topic” as well.

Furl has a lot of little extras too. You can rate a site, and you can easily insert previous topics you’ve used for other pages as tags for the current one.

On the downside, you do need to put up with some text based ads, and there is no feature for saving multiple pages all at once on a site if you want to save a full article (a tip though: if the article you’re saving offers a “Print This” or “Printer Friendly” link (as many do), it will usually redirect you to a version of the article that puts the full content on a single page. You can then use Furl to save that one-page version of the article, rather than having to save multiple pages individually.). Other small drawbacks of Furl include the lack of searching on one’s “keywords” and the inability to create a larger umbrella “topic” where narrower topics can be placed.

As mentioned initially, though the biggest drawback with Furl is that it does not have a specific group creation feature, which is a major problem for business/enterprise use. Michael Grubb, CTO of Furl.com told me that the firm is “working on this” but in the meantime, he passed along some workaround tips that can be used to create groups on the fly:

• subscribe to specific other users’ headlines;
• create and share a specific tag (and make it obscure enough to prevent others using it);
• perform a “save and email” function to designated persons or an alias that emails to larger group;
• create a single name/email account for use by members of the entire group

My Grades:

Group Function Capability: C
Research Value: A
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: B+
Fully Featured: B+

Magnolia 3.75 (A-)

Magnolia has lots of nice touches—it starts with an attractive and elegant interface with thumbnail pictures. It’s also nice that it automatically inserts the page’s title in the bookmark pop-up, as well as whatever you highlight on the page in the description as well.

The Groups creation feature is particularly simple and elegant. You can create a group easily, and then whenever you bookmark a page, you have an option to save it to any of your groups. Furthermore, when you do a search, you can limit your search to pages within a specific group

Searching is excellent too, as you can search on tags, titles, descriptions or ratings.

The downsides? There is a little bit of contextual keyword ads to put up with, and unlike most of the other sites here, you aren’t shown related tags, nor is there a tag suggest feature.

My Grades:

Group Function Capability: A
Research Value: A-
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A
Fully Featured: B+

Simpy 3.275 (B+)

Although I liked Simpy’s features and search capabilities, I found its home page to be the most cluttered and the navigation to be the most confusing of these social bookmarking sites.

On the plus side, though, it’s generally pretty easy though to create a new group on Simpy. There are even some additional options available when creating new groups (you can choose to keep it public or private; you can open it to anyone or only by invitation; and invites can be done by any member or only the creator)

I also liked the search capability. Simpy was very good at identifying other Simpy users who have created similar tags, which is a good feature for social networking purposes. In addition, Simply supports full Boolean searching (and truncation), and the use of several fields for making searches more precise: the specific fields supported are: title, bookmark nickname, tag, and notes (to search a notes field).

Finally, I also liked the fact that I could “watch” a user with keyword filters as well—a nice way to make for precision bookmark monitoring.

My Grades:

Group function Capability: A-
Research Value: A-
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: C
Fully Featured: A-

Shadows (owned by Pluck) 3.075 (B)

Along with Magnolia, Shadows stands out for providing the most elegant and neatest looking interface. Its automatic integration of a thumbnail of a saved page really does make this site appealing to view. The whole interface is well designed, the text is well written, and it looks like a lot of thought went into designing it.

I also liked very much how easy it is to create a group. You just click on the “Create a Group” page at http://www.shadows.com/grouplist/ and you’re on your way! You can even assign “administration privileges” as well to inform Shadows who is permitted to manage the group. Unfortunately, there is no way to make a group private however, which is a drawback for business use.

A few other plusses were the ability to rate links, and to make comments on them as well.

Where Shadows falls shorts is in its search function. There is only a simple keyword search of tags, and that’s it. In terms of key features, it is missing “related tags”; “related users” and “tag suggest”

My Grades:

Group Function Capability: B+
Research Value: B-
Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A
Fully Featured: C+

Your comments and reactions?