New Addiction: Social Bookmarking

The guy on the right is Stefan Weitz from the Microsoft Windows Server group and he is cool for two reasons: He bought me lunch the last time I was in Redmond (so there, I got at least something from Microsoft) and he is responsible for a lot of the cool stuff we get in the user group world, namely, the 150 seat livemeeting accounts for remote presentations. However, Stefan is also responsible for the social bookmarking, tagging, noting and sharing project at Microsoft: theworkingnetwork.com. The goal of The Working Network and its distributed opml gadget (or widget or whatever they call it) is to give IT Professionals access to reputation-ranked blogs and community sites so they can find out if a person is a reputable provider of information based on the ratings of others in the community. Check out the OPML-meter video that Scoble did with them to find out what its all about. But outside the beta developing world, I've really hooked myself up with del.icio.us and spent more time browsing in the past two days than I have nearly year-to-date. The first thing I did after opening my account was to hit up my Tampa barbie girl and see what she's up to. After her, I started looking at popular stuff and got around to tagging a bunch of newbie sites on AJAX. Check it out: http://del.icio.us/vladmazek and get your own. For a more distributed one check out theworkingnetwork.com and look for the Community Bar. Video itself is fascinating but almost 40 minutes long.