Social Bookmarking

Over the holiday season I sought for a solution to keep my bookmarks between my private and my working computer in sync. Although Firefox comes with a synchronization feature, I aimed more to a solution based on social bookmarking. Back in the days when working for IBM Software Services for Lotus I used social bookmarking on the internal platform - guess what - Lotus Connections (now IBM Connections), which had a good browser integration (an IBM internally available extension, I don't know if that's now part of the product or a free or paid asset). However, the combination of persisting my bookmarks and sharing my (tagged) links with the community was a great added value to my work as it significantly decreased the time to find specific information, especially in the field I was working in and in the network of colleagues that worked in the same field.
So the requirements for my sought-for social bookmarking solution were set:

• Browser integration being a substitute for Browser Bookmarks
• Synchronization between different working stations
• Support for Tagging, to ease search for information 
• Possibility to share links with colleagues and friends
• Possibility to have private links

I remembered, that there had been a social bookmarking site, if not THE social bookmarking site, called del.icio.us that had a good browser integration. So I started using it. But my experience with it was not that good and I guess it has its origin in the history of the site. Delicious was bought by yahoo, went through years of stagnation before it was sold again to AVOS, the company of the founders of youtube. The browser integration developed by yahoo doesn't seem well supported anymore (or at the moment?), especially the synchronization between browser and website brakes frequently and you have to sign out, delete the local bookmarks and sign in again (the sign-in of the browser extension is done via the website previous.delicious.com, that says everything). So I ended multiple times with editing bookmarks in the extension that were not persisted on the website or editing bookmarks on the websites that were not only not synchronized to the browser, but overwritten again with the data from the browser. On top of that, I don't find the web UI not very user friendly, it's overly simplistic and not very intuitive. So I sought for an alternative.

I took StumbleUpon into consideration, but it's poor browser integration (incompatible with NoScript plugin) was a no-go. Further it focuses more on news than knowledge sharing and has no concept of private links - everything is public. Though I find the idea behind stumble upon generally intriguing, it's not what I was looking for.
Google Bookmarks fell short a good browser integration and Evernote although allowing to capture merely everything is not really a social bookmarking site and therefore lacks some basic functionality.

After reading the good blog post regarding "10 Alternatives to Delicious.com" I tried out Diigo. And I must admit, that's exactly what I was looking for, even more. It comes with a browser plugin that allows to easily capture new bookmarks and also display your bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar based on custom filters on the captured bookmarks. Bookmarks can also be organized into lists that can be filtered too. Further, the plugin has a sidebar to quickly search all your captured bookmarks. For me Diigo is a complete replacement for the browser bookmark management and helps me easily to keep in sync with different computer, including smart phones, as it also provides a neat app.
But Diigo is not only a social bookmarking tool. It goes well beyond that, its a knowledge working tool. With Diigo you can add sticky notes to web pages, highlight passages, comment on them, capture images, capture parts of a web page as image and share everything of that with the public or a group of people, and of course keep them private as well. So whenever I capture a bookmark, I can also highlight what was important for me from that page or why I looked up a certain information. When working in a group it helps, sharing certain information with each other.

There may be other alternatives in the web as well, but having found Diigo, I found a solution that works for me, so I stick with that.

tl;dr
Want to do social bookmarking and looking for an alternative to delicious? Try Diigo. It's a knowledge working tool.

My personal world tour 2009, don't miss a show!

Last week I've made up mind about my vacation days this year. It required some planning to get the most out of the weekends with public holidays and the vacation days I have this year, but I think I made the best out of it. So here are my plans.

The whole "travel season" starts in April when the winter - hopefully - has found its end and its getting warmer again. Right in the beginning of April, I'll fly to Dublin. I've never been to Ireland before and this city is on my list of places I'd like to visit. I think I'll hang a little around there in the first weekend of April before I'll have a roadtrip over the isle over the week that follows. In the end of the week I'll return back to Dublin from where I take another flight right over to London where I'll spent the Eastern weekend before returning back to Zurich. Last year I already planned to travel to Irland for a week so I combine the trip with two city trips I planned anyway for the year.

Next trip will be a weekend trip to Prague on the first weekend of May. It will be a three-days-visit, where I'll fly to Prague on thursday evening and return back to Zurich on Monday in early morning. The good thing about this trip is, it doesn't cost my one of my precious vacation days since Friday, 1st May is a public holiday.

Already a week later, I found a really cheap flight to Hamburg (only 28€ !!!) where my mother lives. This week I'll work remotely the whole week and also I am able to attend her birthday celebration the weekend after that. I also planned to spent a couple of days in Stockholm this year. I've never been to Scandinavia before and I chose to start with Sweden and Stockholm. Originally I planned to fly directly from Hamburg to Stockholm, but I found a cheap flight over Riga with a 7h-stop right there. So I decided to make 2 flights instead and spent whole two days in Riga before jumping over to Stockholm for another two days. This will be on the Ascenion Day and the successing weekend, and I just need to use a single vacation day for the friday which is a bridging day. On the next monday I'll return back to Zurich in early moring for work as usual.

Up to this point I've booked most of the flights (7 of 9) and spent "only" 800 Swiss Francs for this, which is quite cheap considering the distances I cover - around 7000km! ... But that is also the reason for planning such a long time in advance - the flights on the public holidays-days are in high demand and get expepensive pretty early.

For the Pentecost weekend I have no plans so far, but maybe I'll spent the weekend in Amsterdam. I've been there once before but I liked it quite a bit there and would really like to go there once again, but thats not a fixed plan so far. Other options for this weekend would be Rome or Athens, I'll see.

Quite a big trip is planned for the end of June which is the longest vacation planned for the year. I'll visit a former colleage of mine from the Boeblingen lab who moved to Stanford in late 2007. Another colleague from the lab will most likely accompany me on this trip. Its planned to stay 2 whole weeks over there. This will be my very first time being far away from Europe (though I've been to Turkey, which belongs to Asia, but it was quite close to Europe) and I'm quite excited to see America respectively the USA :)

In the end of July, I will head north again up to a small village north of Hamburg for the Wacken Open Air which is the world's largest Heavy Metal Open Air festival, and its it's 20th anniversary, and I can tell, I am rather excited to go there, its my second "Wacken".

Up to this point, I'll have been to five cities I've never been to before: Dublin, London, Prague, Riga and Stockholm. Visited another continent (North-America), and by this I will have increased my personal number of countries I've visited by 6 (Ireland, England, Czech Republic, Latvia, Sweden and USA and will have spent most of my vacation days, leaving only more days.

And these two I will use to visit again a friend who lives in Vienna, where we also plan to take over to Bratislava, which is just around 50km away from Vienna, which will increase my cities-and-countries-Ive-been again by one. This trip is panned for late August or early September.

After all these trips, the cold time of year will begin a again, which I consider totally as best time for working.

And to close this post, I'd like to experiment a little bit, how "real" the Web 2.0 community can get. All the city trips mentioned above, I planned to do alone - so far. But I'd like to invite you, to acompany my along the way. If you live in or near one of those cities and like to meet me in person, drinking a beer or a glas of wine with me, guide me through the city, give me recommendations for places I shouldn't miss, offer me accomodation - feel free to contact me! Don't be reluctant, I'm keen to meet new and interessting people, IBMr or no IBMr that doesn't matter, and I'm quite open mindend and uncomplicated :)
For contacting you could use several channels, via comments on this blog, email me, send me a message on Twitter or in Facebook.

A friend in need's a friend indeed, a friend that tweet is better

A couple of months ago shortly after I moved to Zurich, my friends from Stuttgart started to use Twitter and said, its cool for letting others know what one does in the evening so that others could join. Well, I gave it a look and signed up. But it proved no real value to me, not only because it was no use for me knowing what my friends in Stuttgart do in the evening, because I definitely don't drive 200km to join them, moreover they soon lost interest in Twitter (possibly they saw no use for that purpose, too, because they all lived in the same neighborhood)

So I lost twitter a bit out of sight, until last week when I was on the presales meeting about Lotus Connection with another colleague who told me, that twitter could be easily integrated into facebook to update the facebook status. Well, I started updating my facebook status regularly some weeks ago, so I thought I'll give it a closer look.

Connecting the Facebook status with Twitter is described on several blogs like this one. So that was easy. But having to open the Twitter page everytime I want to post something? Thats not going to work out. Following the principle of "Simple ubiquitous online access" (the third principle, thanks Luis for the link :) I had to find a better way of updating my twitter.

First of all, I use my browser almost 95% of my time, so I had to find a way to post to twitter from my browser. After a quite short search I found Twitterbar which lets you post to Twitter directly from the addressbar, but the downside was, that it did not came with a keybord shortcut and I had to press the post button using my mouse (how horrible :). But I found another cool add-on named keyconfig that let me define custom hotkeys. Unfortunately its yet not officially available for FireFox3, so I had to use an experimental version, but thats no problem. In keyconfig I assigned Ctrl+Shift+P to post to the Twitterbar (the command for posting is simply "TWITTERBAR.post();"). So that was done, I was now able to update my facebook status from my browser, that was a real value-add (for me).

With diving deeper into the Social Software topic I also began reading more blogs and following other guys from IBM on twitter I also began to use a news reader (this stuff exists for years now and I justed started using them last weekend, I'm definitely everything but not an early adopter ... )
With using the feedreader and following more on twitter, I also received responses to my posts and liked to answer them, therefor I used another cool tool, Twhirl, which I intend to use to respond. When it comes to posting, I find out its also possible to post via GoogleTalk.

One thing I found out these days for me personally is, that twitter has a real value-add, if its used by others as well and regularly. I can easily been kept informed on what is going on around me, what my colleagues are doing. And not only staying informed, but also getting help. I can post what I am doing, with which I am struggeling or what I'd like to know, and the more knowledgekeepers I have that follow me or read the same feed (like our Lotus Connections Twitter feed) I can get easily help. That is cool!

So as a non-early adopter as I see myself, I experience some aspects of what we are preaching when it comes to business adoption.

• I need someone I can follow, I need content already inside "the system", even if this "content" are other users that are using it (like in twitter)
• I need easy access from everywhere to use it. Now, I have multiple channels of posting to twitter.
• I need some value-add, I don't contribute just because I can. With twitter I even kill two birds with a stone: I keep my facebook status up-to-date (somewhat over-up-to-date I admit) , I see what is going on around me and I have easy and direct access when it comes to help each other or share knowledge.
  

So slowly I see what's the point on this thingy named Web2.0 :)

Btw. the next milestone I'll probably try out when it comes to integration is how I import my blog posts to Facebook notes.

Blogworld, here I come

So thats it, my first blog.

Feels a bit strange, now I also belong to those that feed the world with unasked opinions... but hey, nobody needs to read it if not wanting to.

Why do I start to blog ... well, let me shortly introduce myself to the world, since July this year I'm an IT consultant, working at IBM, in the field of Portals (WebSphere Portal) and social software, mostly Lotus Connections. Well, as I get deeper into the matter, I'm getting familiar with the concepts, and the use of it, and the benefits, and of course I need to know the stuff we are selling. And in terms of social software, we're not only selling the software (Lotus Connections) but moreover the idea behind it.

Last friday we had a presales event at a customer for Lotus Connections, and the customer was very keen on the topic and very interested. The audience ranged from really early adopters to very reluctant but nevertheless very interessted participants. We had a very intense and interessting discussion making this event a quite exciting one.
This discussion dropped my final barrier and after the event I came to the conclusion that I personally have to open myself to the web 2.0 now... I have the feeling that the time has come (and I'm really not an early adopter, too)... and here I am, writing my first blog entry. But I think for a first entry, it is enough for now, but stay tuned, there will be more to follow :)