John Martin's Blog : Social Bookmarks

New Silverlight 2 App Visualizes Social Bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet

John Martin — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:55:00 GMT

Ever wonder what people are actually bookmarking using MSDN and TechNet Social ? Check out the Ticker and find out! With the Ticker, you can quickly see what’s being bookmarked by the technical community right now, today, yesterday, or over the past week....(read more)

5 Ways to Get More Out of Your MSDN and TechNet Library Experience

John Martin — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:16:00 GMT

The online libraries on MSDN and TechNet are among the most used sites on our network. Here's some great ways to get the most out of your Library experience. Bookmark it: Create your own personal library and share it using MSDN Social and TechNet Social...(read more)

VORT-EX08: The Swirling Mass You Actually Want to Get Sucked Into

John Martin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:19:00 GMT

The MSDN and TechNet teams recently helped to launch VORT - EX08 (Virtual Online Remix- Total Experience), an online “virtual” conference for IT professionals, developers, and designers in the Europe. There are cool virtual booths for both MSDN and TechNet....(read more)

Create Customized Social Feeds with MSDN and TechNet Social

John Martin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:20:00 GMT

Thousands of technical professionals worldwide are now using MSDN and TechNet Social and Forums to bookmark and tag online resources. And it's easy to create customized and dynamic feeds from our social platform to publish social content by person, tag,...(read more)

NOW LIVE: Microsoft's New Social App for MSDN, TechNet, and Expression Sites

John Martin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:52:00 GMT

In May, we released a preview of our social bookmarking application. Today, we released v1.0 of social bookmarking for MSDN, TechNet, and Expression. Renamed "Social" (e.g., "TechNet Social"), v1.0 offers social bookmarking and provides several important new capabilities. ...(read more)

New Social Features Integrated into Redesigned MSDN Dev Centers

John Martin — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:25:00 GMT

Building on the new designs that were launched in May , the MSDN team is beginning to release a new round of Dev Center design updates - starting with the Visual Basic Developer Center . Developer Centers are mini-sites on MSDN focused on specific developer...(read more)

At TechEd Australia? Stop by and Meet Us!

John Martin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:00:00 GMT

TechEd Australia is next week! And, our own Shanna Del Conte and Chris Slemp ... ...will be there to meet you, talk with you, show you how we are opening up the MSDN and TechNet sites to the technical community, and get your input. If you are at the event,...(read more)

Microsoft is Planning Much More Than Just Social Bookmarking

John Martin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:16:00 GMT

Our vision is for the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to be the largest and most vibrant online communities for technical professionals, enabling easy connections to the best resources and most knowledgeable people from Microsoft and the global community. Social bookmarking plays a vital role in that vision, but is just one application amongst a network of increasingly integrated applications - all running on a common social platform....(read more)

PREVIEW: v 1.0 of Social Bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet

John Martin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed. Tagging - and especially social bookmarking - are essential ingredients for making this happen.

Back in May, just before TechEd North America, we released a preview version of our new social bookmarking app for MSDN, for TechNet, and for Expression. Since then, thousands of technical professionals from around the world have begun using it to save their web favorites online, share them with others, see what other technical pros are favoriting, and connect with others.

We also got a lot of great feedback on the app itself (thank you!) and I'm happy to say that in early September, we plan on releasing a full version of the app - v 1.0. Here are some new things to look for:

Subscribe to Tags or People: Find a tag you want to follow? Or a fellow bookmarker that bookmarks really good stuff? With the new app, it will be easy to get an RSS subscription for that tag or person (as in, click the orange button).
Browse & Find Users: Search or browse to find people by their display name (e.g., mine is "johmar") and other criteria.
Import Tools: Recognizing that a lot of people already have favorites saved in their browsers or in other social bookmarking sites, the new app will provide a tool for importing your favorites from Microsoft Internet Explorer and from Delicious.
Bookmarking Widget: If you have your own blog or other website, our new bookmarking widget will make it easy for people to bookmark your pages directly to their social bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, or Expression. You'll get traffic from Microsoft when your bookmarked page is published in "social feeds" on our global sites.

Availability in 12 Languages: With the September release, the social bookmarking application will be available in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Here is a screenshot of the v 1.0 home page for MSDN:

Questions? Comments? Feedback?

Let us know by commenting on this blog or in the Social Bookmarks Discussion Forum.

Add MSDN/TechNet "Bookmarklet" to Any Web Page

John Martin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:13:00 GMT

In May, we released a preview of social bookmarking for MSDN, TechNet, and Expression. Since then, thousands of people worldwide have installed our browser-based bookmarklet to add web pages from across the web to the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression "bookmarkspace."

Now, using the javascript below, you can add a link to any web page (like your blog) that will open the appropriate Save a Bookmark page and allow people to bookmark your page to MSDN, TechNet, or Expression.

Try it out!

Bookmark to MSDN

<a href="javascript:void(0);"

onclick="javascript:window.open('http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/bookmarks/en-US/action/Create/s/E/?url=' + encodeURIComponent(location.href) + '&ttl=' + encodeURIComponent(document.title||''), '_blank')">Bookmark on MSDN</a>

<br>

Bookmark to TechNet

<a href="javascript:void(0);"

onclick="javascript:window.open('http://social.technet.microsoft.com/bookmarks/en-US/action/Create/s/E/?url=' + encodeURIComponent(location.href) + '&ttl=' + encodeURIComponent(document.title||''), '_blank')">Bookmark on TechNet</a>

Bookmark to Expression

<a href="javascript:void(0);"

onclick="javascript:window.open('http://social.expression.microsoft.com/bookmarks/en-US/action/Create/s/E/?url=' + encodeURIComponent(location.href) + '&ttl=' + encodeURIComponent(document.title||''), '_blank')">Bookmark on Expression</a>

Find out what Mark Russinovich, Keith Combs, and Bill Hilf are Bookmarking

John Martin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:47:00 GMT

As we kick off the second week of TechEd 2008 North America, we have nearly 1,500 bookmarkers from around the world saving their internet favorites using our TechNet Social Bookmarks Preview.

One of the coolest things about social bookmarking is that you can easily see what others are bookmarking to discover valuable new content. Below are links to the bookmarks saved by some smart people at Microsoft:

Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow
Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Server Marketing
Keith Combs, IT Evangelist

Want to try it out yourself? Visit http://technetbookmarks.com/ to get started. Here also is a good video from the TechEd TechTalk series about social bookmarking on MSDN and TechNet.

"Ticker" and "Orbs" on Silverlight 2 Beta 2

John Martin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Ticker and Orbs are cool new Silverlight apps that visualize online community activity in fun and interesting ways.

Find them here.

Ticker: shows feeds of recent social bookmarks from MSDN and TechNet; see what people are bookmarking - click on a bookmark to stop the flow and open it in your browser.

Orbs: wonder which forum threads are hot on ASP.NET, Channel 9, and other community sites? Orbs will show you.

Both are Silverlight 2 Beta 2 apps, so download the new beta, try them out, and have fun.

Thanks for a Great TechEd Developers 2008!

John Martin — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 23:18:00 GMT

Last week was a great week and I want to thank everyone who visited us in the MSDN Zone and/or attended Tshak's or Paul Johnson's sessions.

I also want to thank the more than 1,200 social bookmarkers from around the world that have started bookmarking using our new Social Bookmarks Preview. We have started to add feeds of social bookmarks to Dev Centers on MSDN and so far, we have them on the VB, VC#, and VSX centers. These feeds are tag-filtered, so if you'd like to contribute to one of those centers, simply use our social bookmarks preview to bookmark a URL (from anywhere on the web - not just Microsoft sites) and apply these tags:

Visual Basic: "visual basic" (use quotes to keep both words in the tag)
Visual C#: "csharp"
Visual Studio Extensibility: "vsx"

If you'd like to learn more about our social bookmarking feed service, see Taylor Parson's blog on it.

We also cut a great TechTalk video that sheds a little light on the technical side of Social Bookmarks on MSDN and TechNet:

Thanks again for your support!

What's Different about Social Bookmarking on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression

John Martin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:11:00 GMT

Quite a few in the blogosphere have noticed our Social Bookmarking Preview (thanks!) but some have also commented that it doesn't really offer anything new or different to the "space."

A few thoughts on that (kind of long ones, sorry)...

The difference between our approach and the approach of other social bookmarking providers becomes more clear when you look at Social Bookmarks not as a stand-alone experience, but as one feature of a larger integrated community site (i.e., MSDN or TechNet) powered by a single Social Platform.

When you look at it that way...

Bookmarking and tagging will be baked into the entire site experience. You can see tagging in a lot of places on our sites today, including the MSDN and TechNet Libraries, Codeplex, MSDN Code Gallery, and our new Forums application. When you tag a Library page or Forum thread, you are actually bookmarking the object and applying a tag. With Social Bookmarks, a URL is just another object to which you can apply a tag. The fact that tagging “stuff” – whether it’s a forum thread or a URL – is technically the same, makes it easy for us to integrate all the things on our sites that have been tagged. And the more tagged objects you have, the more powerfully you can describe, organize, filter, and display information on the sites. Jeff Day has a good blog post on this. Also see the new social feeds on MSDN.

So, why should you care? Our bookmarking actually supports "inline bookmarking" (see Forums) for easy tagging of on-site content and customers can manage tagged on-site content and off-site content (Social Bookmarks) together in one place - My Bookmarks. It also means we can build rich feeds of "related content" of all kinds (based on tags) and make those feeds available in key places like our Developer Centers on MSDN and TechCenters on TechNet (better faster discoverability).

As a part of our Social Platform, tagging on-site content and social bookmarking will be integrated into our Recognition System - the same system that awards points and medals for asking and answering questions in Forums.

So, why should you care? Using our bookmarking and tagging, customers will get credit or recognition within the technical community for their contributions (more Return for the Investment of bookmarking). Looking at it the other way, seeing a popular item bookmarked on an a site like Delicious may be helpful, but how differently would you think about that bookmark if you saw it was provided by a highly-rated Microsoft MVP?

Finally, unlike most dedicated social bookmarking sites, the community of bookmarkers and taggers on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression Social Bookmarks will be almost entirely made up of technical professionals, all interested in some way and to one degree or another, in learning about, using, and succeeding with Microsoft products and technologies. Simply put, when you look at the All Bookmarks view, you're seeing things that have been bookmarked by other people in your field.

So, why should you care? The focus and depth of the technical community on our sites increases the relevance of the bookmarks in the system and the value of the connections you might create with other bookmarkers.

I hope this helps provide more clarity into what we are doing with social bookmakring on the sites. As our team gets beyond the preview, we will be integrating bookmarking and tagging more fully into the sites and you should see what I'm talking about above become a reality.

See What People are Bookmarking with "The Ticker" for MSDN & TechNet

John Martin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:55:00 GMT

With social bookmarking for MSDN and TechNet, members of the technical community can bookmark and tag online resources for their own use and for the benefit of others. Bookmarked resources can even be published as feeds on the sites.

Now, The Ticker (developed using Silverlight 2 Beta) offers a cool new way to look at social bookmarking activity on MSDN and TechNet.

New bookmarks scroll in from the right; click on a bookmark to open it; choose to see bookmarks from MSDN or TechNet or both; choose different time periods including Now!

See what comes through, have fun, and let us know what you think.