A couple months ago I was faced with once again wiping my Windows system. As an experienced "systems guy", this is one of the more frustrating propositions, relatively speaking. As I'm sure most Windows users are familiar, perhaps as much as once or more per year, I believe most people have grown accustomed to the non-permanence of their browser bookmarks. I finally decided to invest the time to finally find a solution.
Xmarks, at the time called Foxmarks and renamed within weeks, is the web bookmarking solution I had been looking for.
Not to be confused with the myriad of social bookmarking solutions out there Xmarks fills a different need. Xmarks integrates seamlessly with the existing bookmarking feature of your browser (or Favorites if you are an Internet Explorer user). It synchronizes, and centralizes, your bookmarks on their servers. You can then load your bookmarks on any system or browser, even a newly wiped one. I can load Xmarks on my Firefox browser on my primary system and Internet Explorer on my test system. I can access my bookmarks from my Windows, Linux, or newly aquired Mac system. If I bookmark a page on my work computer, it is instally available on my personal computer and visa verse.
Different from social bookmarking services, Xmarks provides me with backup and portability of all my bookmarks. The result is the return of the value of bookmarks.
I gave up long ago on relying on my bookmarks as a persistant library of personaly valued information. I had stopped bookmarking or taking the time to organize or categorize bookmarks only knowing any effort would be for not within months.
Xmarks does have social bookmarking/shareing features such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. (which I am a big fan of) which is a bonus, but it is not, in my opinion, its strong suit. If Xmarks does hit critinal mass, its impact in this area will definately be something to watch. But for the mean time, it has resurected the value of the browser/web bookmark entirely.



I usually present this idea to clients in terms of 'At', 'To', and 'With'.
No one can guarantee you your "virual execution" will go virual. No one. That said, there are best practices that have come about that we can look to to increase our odds. My favorite is the 3 S's: simple, socialable, shareable.
If you are thinking about making your foray into social media, you need to be thinking PR.
Well, it finally happened. You may have heard, or been the target of, a very popular domain registration scam that has been going around for some time. It's the email you get that says, "so-and-so is about to register [insert some derivation of your legitimately registered domain here]. Act now and we will register it in your name for [insert absorbinant price here]."
The mood on Wikipedia is mixed right now to say the least. But, I find it interesting that the only people I hear criticizing Wikipedia tend to be industry people. I've never heard a student, family member, or anyone other normal person looking for a simple yet fairly comprehensive answer to a simple question, do anything but sing praises for Wikipedia.
While at AdTech in New York a few weeks ago I came across a very interesting technology from a startup company by the name of