Catshanghai

I started using the Internet in the mid nineties. Early browsers had bookmark tools to save links for later use, but you could not use them when you worked on a different computer. There were fixes. Roaming profiles allowed you to open your favourites on a different computer on the same network. I even tried making a Word document listing my favourite links, but this was too much work.

Bookmarking has improved a lot in the last few years. Google and Yahoo allow account holders to create favourite lists that they can carry around the Internet with them.  Del.icio.us is a service that allows Internet users to tag pages they like, annotate them and even share them with other users to create a community of people who like looking at the same pages. It’s a bit like writing messages to your friends on the margin of a library book. Digg is famous, because it takes this social bookmarking to a new level as users vote on the articles, pages and stories that they like to get them to the front page. I uses these services sometimes to look at recommendations for issues and stories that are relevant and making waves at the moment.

Yesterday, I read about a fantastic tool that is going to change the way that I interact with webpages. It is called Stickis and it works in a very similar way to Del.icio.us except that it has a much better interface and the annotations pop up as overlays whenever you visit a tagged url. You make notes by clicking on an add note button that sits on your toolbar. You need to add a stickis extension to Firefox or IE to put this button on your toolbar. It is very easy to use and it has a feature that allows you to send your notes directly to your blog. This is going to make blog writing very easy. You can look at your notes or other people’s. I want my students to use this to write summaries and commentaries about the ITGS websites they are looking at. Anyway, this is what it looks like.