Blue Dot is not just another social bookmarking system

July 6th, 2006 at 1:46 pm

The nasty review was just the complaints at the end of the post above way amplified because I hadn’t really wrapped my brain around the cool features I ended up writing about. Public/private social bookmarking is so much cruder than the ability to create as many different groups as you wish to share bookmarks with.

Many of these features may be found in other contexts, but in the social bookmarking space I think this is pioneering.

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July 6th, 2006 at 10:25 pm

This is my take on yet another social bookmarking service hitting the market. (apologies in advance for the length).

I have been watching this space avidly since I have an interest in using my bookmarks for professional purposes. None of the players has yet thought beyond building a community of bookmarking users that ‘tag’ web sites and share them, in most cases they are not sharing useful information but just associating themselves to popular web sites.

I keep bookmarks that are useful to my present internet business (mobile related) and to research which can be useful to my business, colleagues and customers. The information I use to describe this research goes well beyond adding a single tag (useless). As an example I spent a lot of time researching the VOIP market last year and have over 500+ bookmarks which represent a lot of research and effort. These bookmarks have information including business model definition, impact analysis (viral, community, technical), revenue potential, multiple comments from reviewers etc. In short these bookmarks are research.

Why none of the bookmarking players have not thought beyond just sharing bookmarks but to view them as a research tool is a mystery to me. If you want a business model, here is one. If somebody dedicates many hours of research and saves that research in the form of a bookmark where his/her research comments can be aggregated (plus the comments of others colleagues/users) you start to add value to the bookmark. A bookmark saved by multiple business users for its useful business research purpose is more valuable than having thousands of users adding a single tag to a bookmark with a comment ‘this site rocks’.

So to all of you budding social bookmarking sites out there. Get a hold of your work and start thinking business. Their is a market out there for bookmarks that have been validated by other business users. There are many internet/research professionals (including this blog) that investigate web sites and companies and analyse them with commentary and for specific reasons. None of your tools address this.

As a further example, if you are a business entering into a new market area (lets use VOIP again), is it easier to type in VOIP on Google and perform your own research or pay $150 for a set of bookmarks that have been validated, commented, reviewed and described by many other business users? If the bookmarks represent several months of research by a single (qualified) business user he/she can work with a bookmark trading community and earn money from his/her work. You will be creating a service offering value to the buyer (quick, validated research) and a new trading market for users that have created value around the bookmarks they have stored with the service.

I suppose I am a bit disappointed that none of the bookmarkservices out in the interweb 2.0 have yet seen this as a market for exploitation. What would Google think if bookmarks they present in a search process not only get represented by their ‘linking’ algorithm but they have a business validation algorithm where the importance of the web site is represented in terms of its business use and by the profile of the business users that have previously visited the web site, researched it and saved it as a useful research commodity. In addition, if the bookmark had been sold many times as part of research, does it make that bookmark more valuable than a bookmark that is unknown in the business community?.

Basic search is not providing all the answers business users need when using the internet, a business bookmarking service can be a valuable resource to this type of user. Why search yourself when thousands of others have already done the same and added immense value to the search with commentary and analysis.

I know there is a lot more to it than just the simple commentary I have added here in this post, but none of the bookmarking services I have seen spring up have addressed the professional user, or have they addressed a potential B2B trading market which is untapped.

Why have I not explored this commercially myself? I am too busy at this moment with a mobile community of 2.5M users - still in stealth mode :0)

But if any of the social bookmarking services want to address this, the requirements and technical background to this is available.

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