Link Saving Tools
Ted Tjaden sparked a good discussion here on whether lists of links are useful on a firm’s intranet. But whether or not your useful links live in such a corporate location, there has to be a way to record URLs that interest you. Of course, each browser has a bookmarks feature, replete with the ability to create folders and to organize them according to your own sense of order. But, as the post on ReadWriteWeb says, you don’t always want to clutter up your more-or-less permanent list with ephemera — those sites that you think might be interesting to look at, come that day when you’ve got time.
The post mentions six apps that do the job, some with more bells and whistles than others; and you’ll find perhaps half a dozen more mentioned in the comments. (Might be interesting to use app A for this sort of link, app B for that…) I don’t have a recommendation among them all, but I’m trying out LaterLoop, which is described as offering the best features. It has mobile support, the ability to import from other systems, and “sharing options” with Del.icio.us, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. LaterLoop is also experimenting with a (fairly crude) offline function, whereby you can download a zip file of your last n links for use on the airplane. (Of course, if you don’t have internet access, your links are going to be useless anyway; so I can’t quite — yet? — see the point.)
I was teaching my social networking tools class yesterday in Ottawa, mostly to federal government information specialists. del.icio.us captured their imagination, and they were wondering if there are any social bookmarking tools for inside the organization. They thought this would be a great way for teams to share their favourite links dynamically without the onus being just on the library or KM staff to find and maintain lists. I know that Lotus has developed one for its customers. I am on the look out for any others for use inside the firewall. Does anyone know of any others??
Seems a tad paranoid to want your links behind a firewall. One simple solution is to have a hard to guess URL and count on that to keep out the Russkies. LaterLoop, for example, let’s me select the subdirectory name. I imagine that 7y54fg99l would be fairly secure, for example.
Ah, I think I misunderstood: if you’ve got a firewall, you can’t write to an offsite location. Is that the problem?
From the point of view of a government department, many would prefer to keep their shared work (including links they have selected, tagged, and organized) out of the public eye, and inside the firewall.
I’m sure there are other large organizations that would like to do this as well.
In response to Connie’s question “if there are any social bookmarking tools for inside the organization” – Yes. Connectbeam is a company that is trying to bring Web 2.0 into the enterprise. Here are some LawyerKM posts about it and similar things (See the August 12, 2007 entry in particular)
http://lawyerkm.wordpress.com/?s=connectbeam
Thanks kindly, Patrick. I’m glad to hear there has been work in this area. I should point out that the IBM/Lotus tool is called Dogear. Has anyone heard of others?
Cheers,
Connie