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Intelligent Bookmarking


Group RSS, Friend Recommendations, and Internet Explorer AlphaJuly 11

This past couple of weeks we’ve been hard at work implementing a few improvements and some major new features.

After many months of working hard (and jumping over many, many hurdles), we’ve finally got a plugin available for Internet Explorer.  It’s in Alpha stage, so it may have problems, but we’d be very grateful to have some feedback on it. You can get Zigtag for Internet Explorer Alpha here.

After receiving several requests from our users, we have also added the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed from any public or membership group.  This should enable much better collaboration between users of these groups. Unfortunately, RSS feeds on private groups are still not implemented due to RSS readers’ lack of support for authentication, but we will work on a solution for that sometime down the road.

Lastly, we’re happy to introduce a very cool new feature - friend recommendations.  Based on certain tags you’ve used, Zigtag is able to match you with other users based on interest.  Best of all, as your interests change over time, so will your friend recommendations - it’s sure to help you find and meet new people on the internet!  In the next little while, we will also be extending this to group recommendations, as well as bookmark recommendations!


Great Article on Zigtag / Update on Future PlansJune 27

Zigtag got a great writeup from one of our users, Paul Haley, on his blog.  Not only does the article describe the differences between Zigtag’s semantic tagging system vs. Twine’s, but it also talks about online collaboration with groups, and data portability.

Given that Paul had some questions he raised in the article, I thought I’d respond to some of them here.

Paul mentioned that he was slightly cautious about using Zigtag or Twine because of the lack of a semantic export mechanism (it is important to note that we do export to del.icio.us and other formats, and a semantic export is not supported at this time because, well, there are no other applications that can read Zigtag’s semantic data and actually do anything with it).  The short term development plan includes releasing an API allowing users to access Zigtag’s semantic ontology and much of the data that we are gathering. This will include a similar API to delicious’, which will allow you to get information on your bookmarks, tags, groups, etc., and it will also allow access to our ontology (or our extensive database of defined tags).   Whether or not the API will use OWL as its format is to be decided, but if there is a market demand for OWL export, we will be happy to provide that.

One of our goals with the API is to allow other applications t


More defined tags now available!June 9

As of this weekend, we have updated our semantic data index. This resulted in the addition of more than 500,000 new defined tags, bringing the total number of defined tags to over 2.2 million.  With the addition of a few new data sources in the near future, this number is sure to grow even further.

In addition, we’ve now made migrating from del.icio.us and other non-semantic data even easier through an interface that allows you to manage your tags.  The tool can be used to show all your undefined tags, and will automatically analyze them to suggest possible semantic tags for them.  With one click, you can assign a defined meaning to them.  It’s also possible to rename them to something completely different, or to delete the tag completely.

For all of those that have imported their del.icio.us bookmarks, be sure to semantify them!


Keeping tags private or sharing them with the worldJune 4

One of Zigtag’s major features is its highly tunable levels of privacy - Zigtag was designed from the ground up with privacy in mind. Privacy levels can be chosen on a tag- or page- level and are customizable for each site you visit.

Every user starts with a default privacy setting that can be chosen during sign up. There are three possible privacy settings:

  • Public
  • Anonymous
  • Private

Public means that you will be credited with the pages that you tag. Users will be able to browse and search your public bookmarks. This is the best option when you wish to share your bookmarks with others.

Anonymous means that your bookmarks are publicly viewable, but you will not be credited with tagging them. Users can browse and search anonymous bookmarks when viewing all saved pages (known as the world view), but not when viewing your profile. You may choose to allow your friends to see your anonymous bookmarks - this option is available in your account settings. We have taken great care to ensure that anonymous bookmarks cannot be traced back to you. The anonymous option is good when you would like to share a page but do not want others to know you tagged it.

Private means that your bookmarks will not be visible to anyone besides yourself. No one will ever know you tagged pages marked private.

Tag privacy vs. page privacy

Privacy can be applied to both tags and pages. Privacy applied to a pag



Zigtag’s Social Features: Zigtag GroupsMay 20

Zigtag groups are a great new approach to collaborative research and learning that allows any group of people to share resources and discuss the group through a forum.

Groups can be private (only members can see the content of the group), membership (everybody can see but only members can contribute), and public (everybody can see and contribute). Create a group for your team at work, for your class or club, or find others who share specific interests!

Posting to a group is easy and there are a few ways to do it:

  • In the sidebar, choose “Tools” > Post to Group, and all the groups you are a member of will show up.
  • Also in the sidebar, click on “Share page”, and choose the “Post To Group” tab.  This way allows you to post the currently displayed page to many groups at once.
  • In the “Explore tags” page, you can right-click a result to post to a group.
  • For advanced users only: You can also type “@<Group name>” in the sidebar “Enter tags” box; choosing a group from the drop-down will not add a tag, but will post to the group instead.

Groups also have discussion boards, which make it easy to communicate with other group members or users with similar interests (read the post on them here).