On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Phil Barker
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Paul, everyone,
I like the aspects of this proposal that go beyond bookmarking as seen in Delicious (though as we discussed at the hackdays bookmarking services that don't rely on Yahoo finding the right buyer for Delicious have their attractions).
Phil, that's just the sentiment that I was planning on expressing.
I'll phrase it a slightly different way, perhaps they want to work with all bookmarking services that provide an API (well maybe pick 2).
The way I think of this proposed idea is that the bookmarking service is a data store for at least some of the metadata. One of the reasons I think bookmarking services were successful in their day and age is that they were very simple to use: URL, title, maybe a description, and tags. As educational technologists, we'd like to see a bit more structure. But it's hard to argue with the simplicity and how much use that simplicity drove.
(We had a set of projects called Folksemantic--linking folksonomies (essentially the self-tagging) and semantic. A few years back we were looking at how we might extract "semantic" meaning from items that were tagged up.)
Also, I'd be a bit concerned about orphaning data if the service went down or was discontinued.
So the twist I'm suggesting is a front end to a bookmarking service that allows you to collect additional structured data while storing some (or all of it) in an existing bookmarking service. (There's a big *if* here, if the service has an API that allows this.)
My other thought is has twitter and hastags and URL shorteners replaced bookmarking services? If they have, what might that imply for the project?