E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Sociable – Bookmark That Weblog Post Now!

In the past you would remember how I have been creating a number of different weblog posts around the subject of social bookmarking indicating a good number of benefits in the Knowledge Management area about why people would want to make extensive use of such tools in order to be able to contribute to that collective wisdom by sharing their favourite bookmarks with everyone else, not just the closest teams / communities to themselves. I have also been indicating how so far I am currently making use of two different social bookmarking tools as my preferred choices: IBM‘s Dogear (For my Intranet bookmarks) and BlinkList (For my Internet bookmarks). Reason why I like these two options is because I feel they are the ones providing with a much more complete experience of what I think social bookmarking should be: i.e. as interactive as possible.

However, I can imagine that other folks may be interested and would want to make use of other options, so just recently I thought I would go and give it a try to one WordPress plugin that would allow me to extend those capabilities to all of the different weblog posts I get to create over here and allow you folks to bookmark whatever weblog posts on the fly and in your favourite tool(s). That way you will not be restricted in any way other than making extensive use of your favourite social bookmarking tool. The lovely plugin currently available and which I am testing over here in elsua is Sociable. For those folks who are also using WordPress as their default weblogging tool, and who would want to give it a try, you can download it over here. Basically, Sociable allows you to select a number of different popular social bookmarking offerings and through some basic configuration add them to every single weblog post you may be sharing directly from the Admin panel.

The result is that within minutes, and without hardly coding from my side, I have now been able to include a bar of items, of bookmarking tools, that people could click on if they would want to bookmark whatever the weblog post. That is why you would be able to find a button for BlinkList (Of course!), del.icio.us (An even more quite an interesting option at the moment since it looks like it apparently allows you import your bookmarks now, once and for all, so I can now see a lovely integration between my BlinkList bookmarks and my Dogear bookmarks coming up using del.icio.us as the connection between the two. Just brilliant!), Digg, Spurl, Furl, Ma.gnolia (An interesting tool I will be weblogging about some time soon), Newsvine, Scutle (Of course, Jean-F, I couldn’t resist the temptation!), Shadows (For those Flock users out there), Simpy and TailRank.

Thus now you would be able to bookmark whatever of elsua‘s weblog post along the way in your favourite bookmarking too and if you see that I have missed any of the popular social bookmarking tools out there just append a comment and if it is available I will gladly go ahead and add it right away. Or alternatively, you could also have a look into the attached weblog post, over at 3spots, 30 Social Bookmarks ‘Add to’ footer links for blogs, in order to be able to add manually up to 30 different social bookmarking buttons to your weblog posts. But remember that most of that would have to be done manually, as opposed to Sociable where you would only need to get it working by clicking a couple of options and off it goes.

Finally, if you are looking as well for an overview of the different social bookmarking tools available out there I would suggest you also take a look into another weblog post I shared a couple of days ago: Web 2.0 Commoditization – ALL Social that CAN bookmark. Over there you will be able to read of an extensive listing of bookmarking tools, with a brief description of how they work and a direct link to it to try it out further. Then over the next few weeks I shall continue weblogging every now and then about the different tools that I may give a try and see how they would fit in not only as collaborative tools but also as Knowledge Management tools so that with my two cents worth of comments there may be other knowledge workers who may benefit from that experience. Thus stay tuned !

Technorati Tags: Sociable, Social Bookmarking, Dogear, BlinkList, del.icio.us, digg, Spurl, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Newsvine, Scutle, Shadows, Simpy, TailRank