At the recent Northern Voice conference Alan Levine made a presentation of WordPress Web sites that don’t look at all like a WordPress blog. Jim Groom also had a presentation about this. Alan had a tag on del.icio.us that he used to keep track of these sites and suggested anyone use it if they also found examples. There were a few people that mentioned work they had done in this area, Alan hit the sites, tagged them, and the source of the information was complete. It was the first time I had seen that happen at a public session.Wikipedia has an interesting introduction on social bookmarking that deserves reading. The article mentions other sites including Simpy and Ma.gnolia. There are a vast variety of features in them all but it brings up the Twitter vs Pownce debate again. Trey twittered William’s quote this morning — community beats cool. With the plethora of web apps available does one choose to use something because it works, works better, has more features or there are more people using it?I would like to use Pownce but there are so few of us there that everyone has drifted back to Twitter. (Flock does a decent but not perfect job of helping one keep informed about the feeds.) So community has outweighed function with that choice. One of the problems we all face is filtering. There are volumes of information pushed out onto the web daily that make it impossible to keep up with. Here again the ‘wisdom of crowds’ comes into play. The use a common social bookmarking service could filter and highlight for all of us those areas of interest. I would love to have an RSS feed of informative bookmarks suggested by friends and peers on a daily basis. It can only add to keeping current on so many important subjects. But again who does one pick? De.licio.us, Ma.gnolia, Simpy or ??
Tinfoiling 
Can you share Alan Levine’s presentation with us? Sounds fascinating.
According to the majority, I would vote for del.icio.us. It’s been out for quite a while and has proven its worth. If you want to be able to interact with others using social bookmarking tools, you’ve got to go with what the flow is using. Simpy and Ma.gnolia may be great tools to use, but its hard to interact with everyone else if you’re the only one using them.
It’s almost like the Mac vs. PC battle, which you and Mt. Lehman seem to fight very well. 😉 Do you go with PCs because they are more mainstream or do you go with Macs because they have more functionality.
Ultimately the choice is up to the end user, but I would vote for sticking to the norm. IMO, there’s no sense inputting all of your bookmarks in a new platform only to reconvert back to something like del.icio.us after a few weeks (which seems to be what happened with Twitter vs. Pownce).
Here is the site he is talking about: http://cat-diaries.blogspot.com/
Here is a key wiki site of information that Alan gave during a tour of Australia. There are some elements of his talk here:
http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/
Here is the only thing on the NV wiki about Alan’s presentation.
Alan Levine – More Than Cat Diaries – Cool Web Sites That Dont Look Like Blogs but run in Blog Software
Nearly every web ite I create these days runs on a blog platform (it hurt a few weeks ago to update an old HTML tabled web site), and I have long been interested in how people are able to create what I call Blogs that Dont Look Like Blogs. Blog run web sites need not be in your face reverse chronology posts. I ran this a few years back as a presentation on More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs (where I wrenched a lot around with Blogger templates) and sometimes remember to tag a few of them as notcatdiaries. This need not be a techie talk, am more interested in hearing how the features of an easy click and publish platforms can help people and groups focus on their priorities, not the nuts and bolts of running web sites. Or just bring some great examples. *(MVB)
It should be easier to choose a social bookmarking site than a chat site because the social and communication aspects are relatively limited… At least in the way that I use them (I use http://delicious.com). I bookmark and tag stuff I want to come back to later, or I bookmark links for somebody else.
But if I just want to see “the most popular sites”, etc. I don’t even have to be a user on the social bookmarking sites. I can go to sites like http://www.viralbabble.com/ and skim the cream (?) off the top.
By the way, Simpy is at http://simpy.com/ — the post has a bad link.
Mike: Simpy is quite big, actually. What kind of communication with users are you looking for? There are Groups on Simpy (not on del.icio.us), emailing, etc.