After finding inspiration in Pinterest and iTunes, Lee has crafted what he calls Mozaic. It’s a new way of displaying bookmarks in a way that takes “advantage of modern advances in usability.” By that, he means that Mozaic displays all of your bookmarks in a visual style reminiscent of Chrome’s and Firefox’s tab page.

Lee has added the following features to the current version of Mozaic:

If you’re interested in the design process behind it, Lee also has an interactive slide showcase detailing the “Bookmarks of the Future.”

Mozaic is also available on GitHub for download as a somewhat functional add-on for newer versions of Firefox. Lee warns that it might be slightly unpredictable at this point, but it’s an interesting take on the tired concept of bookmarks.

When you next visit Google Maps, you’ll see a pop-up message in the left-hand column that points to a place where you can set a location for both home and work (see the lead image to this article). You’ll need to sign into your Google account in order to save a location for Home and Work (you don’t even need to enter your honest work or home locations – go nuts with the new feature!) but once you’ve done so, you’ll then be able to simply click on either the Home or Work link to jump to the respective locations.

If you’re using an iPhone, this feature won’t work with the native Maps app that comes with the phone. However, you can access Google Maps via the web app version and, again, as long as you’re signed in to your Google account, still access the locations you’ve saved as Home and Work. Similar with the webpage, if you begin to type in either word in the search bar, you’ll see your bookmark appear as part of the auto-complete suggestions.

Likewise, you can access the web app for Google Maps if you’re using an Android or Windows phone. As far as Google Maps for Android goes, Google just released version 6.7 last week but I imagine 6.8 or a version soon after will have the Home and Work bookmark features included. If you’re using a Windows phone, give the web app a try.

The Windows 8 team posted on the IEBlog some of the interesting things developers can do with pinned sites. The most obvious is of course the update notifications. At the moment, the main example they show is pretty simple, but it gets the point across. As you can see, the Microsoft icon shows the number of updates since a user last visited.

Web developers can use these site pins as a way to make themselves stand out as well. The icon they use for their site takes up only a small portion of the entire tile, but it has a massive influence on the tile itself. The dominant color in your Web icon will make up the color of the tile itself. Choose a unique color for your icon and you get a unique attention grabbing tile.

If you want to start creating icons right away to get a pinned site up, just know that you will also want to work with badge notifications. This allows Windows 8 to automatically update the pinned site tile with the newest updates in the background. Microsoft has the example code on the blog post that details how developers can start enacting this now.

The IE10 team also points out that a popular feature from IE9 is back in IE10 in a whole new way. They are of course talking about jump lists which allows users to get to a specific part of a site. In IE10, the jump list is now a part of the navigation bar.

Check out the blog post for the code to fully implement these features into your Web site for Windows 8 and IE10. The newest version of Windows may only be in the consumer preview for now, but it’s only a few more months before it goes it starts popping up everywhere. It’s better to get your Web sites ready before it launches.

"This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access," says Google’s Tim Steele.

To use the bookmark sync feature in Chrome, launch Chrome with the –enable-sync command-line flag. After you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will upload and store your bookmarks to your Google account.

When a user wants to change or add a bookmark, the changes will be stored in the cloud and synced on all of the machines being used where the bookmark sync feature is activated.

Mozilla has a similar feature in its Weave product, which allows users of the Firefox browser to sync their preferences on multiple machines. Last month, they announced a new version of it.

This week, Mozilla has shared more details about what they’re working on to improve Weave. These include improvements in performance, usability, bugs, and things beyond just syncing. More details about that here.

It’s more than creating profiles and adding bulk loads of friends in all the social networking sites and blasting out bulletins.  It’s more than creating a link bait video and distributing it in Youtube. And, while social media optimization is an important approach to your marketing strategies, there is more to it. Since the majority of marketers plan to increase spending on social media, it’s time to start thinking strategically about social media marketing. I have mentioned in a previous post that social media is community driven. It’s within these very small and targeted niche communities that viral marketing can give birth; and where conversational marketing can begin to take root. However, before you start spending countless dollars on social media marketing, you should read on.

Define Your Target Audience

It would literally take me days to list out all the social networking/social media/web 2.0 sites that exist today; and even if I had the time, there would be dozens more launching tomorrow. The point is that these sites attract very different users. The demographics of Myspace have changed dramatically; and just because they have several million users doesn’t justify you spending time, energy and resources there. To begin the process of defining your target audience, you should first take a quick snapshot of your users/customers you have today; and ask yourself:

• Who is your most profitable user/customer?
• What’s their demographic profile?
• What characteristics do your users/customers have in common with each other? In other words, what is their psychographic profile?

This valuable research will you help you answer many questions (i.e. where they are spending their time? What are their interests, desires, and hobbies? What are they passionate about?What motivates them?) Additionally, defining your current users/customers will help you craft a marketing strategy and give you direction on which social media channel you should pay attention to. I have seen too many brands that have Myspace profiles just because their competitors do; with no clear strategy on what they are really out to achieve. Establish Your Metrics Measuring social media is definitely a challenge. There are no easy metrics to measure the performance of such campaigns.Of course, I there are the standard metrics (clicks, impressions, etc.) as well as some other metrics to think about if you are blogging, podcasting, etc; specifically around social media optimization.

Without a clear understanding of what your goals are from the beginning, you will find yourself questioning whether or not social media is the right channel for your business. If it’s just web traffic that you are after – no problem – but be sure you have analytic software installed; same concept for your conversion metrics. In most analytic packages, you can set up goals and monitor the conversion rates from specific websites. Regardless of what your metrics are; it’s wise to know what you will be measuring before you actually engage.

Be Authentic

In addition to transparency and disclosure, another characteristic of social media is authenticity.When marketers decide to engage with social media users and begin having community driven conversations, they need to talk with real voices. It’s called Conversational Marketing and it’s something all marketers must embrace if they want to succeed. These conversations should be open-ended and the community should be in the driver’s seat.  Forget the marketing fluff and don’t just pretend to be interested in what they are talking about. Listen. Don’t inundate them with offers, banners or marketing speak.Consumers today are savvy enough to see right through it.

It’s Relationship Marketing 101 with a twist; whereby marketers first build long-term relationships with customers and then focus on monetizing those conversations.

Monetization

Speaking on monetizing these conversations, every marketer will approach this step differently.It really depends on the nature of your business (what you are selling). However, once you define your target audience and understand their true needs and motivations; and, after you reach out to them and have “real” conversations with them – then – you can begin your monetization strategy.I would recommend taking it slowly and start monetizing in steps with a clear process in mind. Otherwise, if you put on your direct marketing hats too fast, you may scare your consumers away.

Keep the conversation alive

So you finally defined your audience; built a relationship with them and even made some extra cash.  The last thing you want to do now is abandon them. Your life-long goal should be to increase the value of your target audience; and essentially create brand ambassadors.These ambassadors will be the cornerstone of your brand and will stick with you through thick and thin.You can do this by keeping the conversation fresh and alive; soliciting ongoing feedback about your products; and of course throwing in some awesome rewards. The best example I can give is what Dell is doing with their site, Ideastorm; where they are giving voices to their customers and soliciting their feedback for future product releases. And guess what? Dell is listening and acting on those suggestions.

Face the facts

Guess what? Consumers today demand to be heard, whether or not you are listening.  And, if you try and interrupt these conversations with a direct marketing approach; your product may go viral, but not with the message that you were expecting.

There is a time and place for direct marketing, don’t get me wrong. I am a big believer in it.But, not while you are conversing with them about topics they are passionate about.

That’s the traditional way of keeping track of content out there you want to refer to again.

What if you want to share your bookmarks? Not easy with a standard Firefox or IE installation without add-ins or plug-ins. And adding links in two separate browsers is a real pain.

That’s where del.icio.us comes in.

If you’re a del.icio.us and Firefox user, you’ll love what’s new with this social bookmarking service. Take a look at this screenshot of my del.icio.us account page:

Notice the left hand sidebar – your tags and your bookmarks of everything you’ve posted to your del.icio.us account. Similar to Firefox so far (well, except the tags).

Now look at the top of the screenshot and notice some new icons next to the address bar – one marked ‘tag’ and the other the del.icio.us logo – as well as a new del.icio.us toolbar above the Google one.

That’s where this gets really interesting and extremely useful.

The folks at del.icio.us have just made your bookmarking and tagging far more useful by integrating Firefox and del.icio.us through a new plug-in.

So instead of having your Firefox bookmarks and a separate set of sharable bookmarks on del.icio.us, you can combine the two into a single set of bookmarks at del.icio.us which you can choose to share or not. Plus you can access those bookmarks from any computer connected to the net, using any browser.

Of course, you don’t have to integrate your Firefox bookmarks – you can install the plug-in and still keep things separate. I can see where you might want to do this, eg, if you have things like online banking or other sensitive links in your Firefox bookmarks.

The good news is you can be selective re which Firefox bookmarks you integrate with del.icio.us, so removing any concerns about your sensitive links.

Once you have things set up at del.icio.us, you can then manipulate the links and how they’re displayed. Sort in alphabetical order. Sort your tags the same way or entirely differently. Other options to help you efficiently manage your links. You can export them and save a backup file on your computer.

This is a terrific tool! For me, it also means that finally I will get to use del.icio.us far more extensively than I have to date. Be better organized. No more adding to static bookmarks.

If you’re not yet a del.icio.us user, this will surely tempt you and bring you into the world of tagging and sharing the content you find valuable.

Give it a whirl.

[Edit] One thing I didn’t spot until just now – a new menu item in Firefox squeezed between ‘History’ and ‘Bookmarks’ that shows all your del.iciou.us content just like the traditional Firefox bookmarks list, but also with a choice that displays all your content by their tags.

From here, you can also manage your deli.icio.us network, your subscriptions, import bookmarks, and a bunch of other things.

Oh this is so useful!

Comments

It’s no secret to WebProNews readers who have hit my articles from time to time that I’ve been a big fan of the Opera browser for years. Tabbed browsing and no IE worries have been enjoyable experiences with it.

I won’t even pretend to remember where I first heard that people tend to stick to a limited group of websites that they visit regularly. RSS feeds have probably had an impact on that for the more tech-savvy users, but plenty of people rely on good old bookmarks to get to their favorite places.

Opera has a beta version, 9.20, of its next browser available for testing. The clever folks in Oslo, Opera’s homebase, have added a new feature called Speed Dial to it for those repeat bookmarked site visitors.

Once Opera 9.20 has been installed, Speed Dial will become available in a tab. Click one of the nine boxes, and you have a choice of picking a frequently visited page, open pages, or a typed-in web address, to make one of the Speed Dial selections.

Speed Dial goes out and grabs a screenshot of the page, and displays it in the box. It’s similar to what you see when hovering the mouse pointer over a tab in Opera, where a thumbnail of the site appears.

Opening a new tab makes Speed Dial appear. Clicking a ‘Hide Speed Dial’ link puts it away, and a ‘Show Speed Dial’ link appears in the bottom right of a blank new tab page.

The Speed Dial feature is a nice little super-bookmark implementation, and having some frequently visited links available immediately does speed up browsing. I’ve already got mine populated with links.

One of the memes I’ve been noticing is the issue of spamming social media. A particular aspect brought to my attention recently is the idea that by making it easier for users to bookmark or “vote” for content on social news and bookmarking services, perhaps by using our social bookmarks link tool, that it’s an invitation to spam.

There’s a difference between ease of submission and getting to the first page of a social news or bookmarking site, where the most benefit is. The communities of those social media sites provide a self policing effect against most types of SM spam. I agree, that making submissions easier may attract abuse, but it will be noise hanging at the bottom.

Any experienced search or social media marketer knows there are ways to initially “boost” articles on social media sites, but that can only go so far. In most cases, the articles hit the “popular” list (del.icio.us) or first page (Digg) based on merit, not manipulation. ie, it’s pretty tough to “fake” the number of votes required to get that kind of placement. And even if they are faked, there is the self policing editorial process of the community and algorithmic detection of “group voting”.

Example: A friend of mine let me know he posted to Digg a blog post I wrote recently, “Blogger Relations 101“. I took the initiative to then use the form Digg provides on it’s site to invite about 10 people to look at the article summary at Digg. Some of them voted, some of them did not. Within 3 hours the post hit the Digg front page after getting more than 150 votes. The post also hit the del.icio.us popular page with ZERO effort from me. Within 5-6 hours there were over 2500 new unique visitors to my blog all because of one blog post. New traffic continues to roll in. This article would not have gathered attention if it did not have merit.

Another angle on the use of social bookmarks is in the context of the social media press release format. However, social news and bookmark communities (at least now) are not prone to voting for press releases. They vote for articles in mainstream media, blog posts, web 2.0 applications or videos for the most part. This may change, especially as the new media press release format improves and gets used more often.

Anyone concerned about spamming social media should consider that social online communities have built in social and technical self policing mechanisms that are continually evolving. That doesn’t mean the system can’t be gamed, but it’s not exactly the wild west either. The success of social media is directly tied to the quality of content and user experience. Spamming social media directly contradicts that and users are quick to point it out and “bury” or “kill” efforts to do so.

In a way, it’s like spamming thought aggressive search engine optimization or press release spam. Results are short lived, if at all, risky and more often than not, not worth the trouble. Great optimized content is what drives long term value and results anyway. I think the same goes for social media, press releases or any other kind of content. What do you think?

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
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Users of Yahoo MyWeb may wish to take note of the latest news from the company. It looks like MyWeb will come to an end soon:

>
The development teams for the Toolbar and Bookmarks products provided a summary of the new features made available with the release of those beta versions:

If you have come to love video online, be sure to check out Tom Chi’s screencast describing the features in Yahoo Bookmarks. TechCrunch noted that Chi created the nifty backing music track for the demonstration.

(See if you can spot the unfortunate spelling error displayed in the My Folders section of the Bookmarks page shown in the screencast.)

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Between the Lines from Shaan Hurley is a great generic AutoCAD blog… perhaps THE premier Autodesk blog – http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines
Beyond the Paper is all about DWF – http://blogs.autodesk.com/beyond_the_paper
Between the Poles is another fine resource (although the author has yet to link to my AnyGeo blog!) – see http://blogs.autodesk.com/between_the_poles
One of my favorite reads (although not strictly GIS focused) is Lynn Allen’s Blog – http://blogs.autodesk.com/between_the_poles
Heidi’s AutoCAD Insider blog is also very informative – see http://heidihewett.blogs.com/
finally, how about the official show blog – see http://auol.wordpress.com/ – great idea… every event needs their own official blog.
The only thing missing is an official show tag… how about AutodeskU06?
Fyi, yours truly will be at AU once again (I think this will be number – I’ll also be blogging from the event in Vegas so AnyGeo (gisuser.blogspot.com) is also a good AU blog to bookmark!

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com