You can have tags for types, along with “usual” tags, but the problem is behavior. You need links semantically classified as different to have different behavior. That is what Licorize does, more than Delicious and usual bookmarking services do.

When I started using it it was great. But as I kept bookmarking, I never did maintenance, and old links that have become irrelevant are always there and I could no longer see what was relevant and what not. It ended being an unreadable cloud and so I stopped using it.

In Licorize too you preserve all bookmarks, but maintenance comes naturally from the fact that you distribute bookmarks into “teams at work” i.e. projects, ideas, presentations – and also because the user interface is more reactive and allows more “in place” actions. Delicious basic approach is flat – which is great at the beginning, but in time is not enough in many cases.

Want to try it out? Licorize has a complete Delicious bookmarks import.

A note for Licorize alpha version: a great feature that Delicious has and Licorize currently doesn’t is sharing bookmarks at an URL – we’re building that and there too we are trying to do something better than a plain list. It will be something similar to what Flipboard does to Tweet lists.

I have submitted a proposal for a community site on Area51 of StackExchange, concerning “Copywriting & applications”:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/14040/copywriting-applications

with this explanation:

Proposed Q&A site for copywriters that have questions concerning copy in general and specific applications and media.

There are already proposals that are vaguely related to this topic, e.g.

On Writing in general: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1623/writing

And technical writing: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/8847/technical-writing

but copy is a quite specific skill, and knowledge necessary for its application in different media is considerable. Writing copy is a profession(*) and hence I believe it deserves a dedicated Q&A site.

There is also a proposal concerning copy, Blogging and Copywriting: but this too me too restrictive, in particular considering that the same copy often gets used in different kinds of publications.

So… support and contribute to this proposal!

Note (*): E.g. read

My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic: Everything You Need to Know About Art, Ads, Life, God and Other Mysteries and Weren’t Afraid to Ask

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Name-Charles-Saatchi-Artoholic-Everything/dp/0714857475

I already wrote about my efforts in Learning home made copywriting. The basic problem for copywriting is that you have to have something to say, and have enough imagination to see how interesting it could be for non informed readers. Assuming this, you then need

(1). general writing skills,

and

(2). specific knowledge for marketing copy.

For point (1), it is hard to pick out readings: learning to write well is a vague and hard task. I am studying fiction writing, and this has helped a great deal, but I can’t single out an instructional book for this task. Like, an exercise could be: read (or better: re-read) one of Stieg Larsson books, and try to find out the techniques he uses to keep the attention of the reader. He is a master in that (though I don’t particularly like the books).

Point 2 also involves knowledge of the specific market for which you are writing, and familiarity with marketing technioques. For this, I find Seth Godin books a great help.

For web sites on copy I advise http://www.copyblogger.com/, in particular

http://www.copyblogger.com/copywriting-101/

For readings, though it is not specifically about copy for web marketing, some good ideas from an old copy of some success :

My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic: Everything You Need to Know About Art, Ads, Life, God and Other Mysteries and Weren’t Afraid to Ask

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Name-Charles-Saatchi-Artoholic-Everything/dp/0714857475

Have a good summer.

How *Specifically* Did Balsamiq Bootstrap Its Way To $2 Mil In Sales in 18 Months? – with Peldi Guilizzoni

on Mixergy: http://mixergy.com/balsamiq-peldi-guilizzoni-interview/

The only thing that leaves me a bit perplex in this interview is Peldi’s worry abut his “rocket” success (nice metaphor) suddenly falling. Made me think about how software adoption and abandonment goes.

Mockups has somehow brought “mockupping” to the non design-educated masses – of which I am a member. The fact that “suddenly” all we non-professional mockuppers adopted Balsamiq is not somehow a symptom that we may just as suddenly drop it. Actually, differently from a passionate, professional mockupper, who is always willing to try, test and learn new tools, “we” are not willing to spend a minute on another tool: we adopted Balsamiq exactly because it was so easily to adopt, and are unwilling to change.

Adopted software is amazingly “resilient” with users. That is also why there are still so many DOS applications around. And for people that like me go to work in different organizations, we see how much “old” software is still (happily) used.

For more on this point – adopted software will not be abandoned easily – see also this discussion with a different focus (software rewrite and technical debt) but with several similar observations:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/360297/lifespan-of-software-how-often-do-you-expect-to-do-start-from-scratch

And then there is also to consider what is the reach and authority of the Balsamiq mockup solution in different communities. Balsamiq looks to be popular in diverse environments, and as anyone with experience in web marketing knows, different communities don’t “talk” much with each other. If you are popular with jQuery developers, you may be unknown among Agile project managers, and so on.

This would make it still harder for any competitor to take the place of Balsamiq.

So, I don’t think there is too much to worry. Look forward to hearing about your next tool, Balsamiq people!

Matteo Bicocchi’s (“pupunzi”) mappping of neeeds of site improvements to Patapage:

9 ways to improve your site but you don’t know how to

My mapping of different work management needs with Teamwork:

Stories of work management

Your software is what people’s usage makes of it.

I posted the release on hacker news with “Ajax-widget based "CMS" is online”. Patapage is such a radically new tool that it is very hard to express it in just one sentence. Other ways of characterizing it are: “Web mashups made simple”, or “Widgets in your design”. Anyway, we wrote a 84-page introduction and user guide, get it here: http://patapage.com/applications/pataPage/site/details.jsp

With that it should be all clear .

Here I give some quick impressions and links.

The organizers: a word of praise to the organizers, Develer (http://develer.com). I lived the event as speaker, student and (satirical) “journalist”. In all three roles, I appreciated their efficiency, practical sense and also sense of humor, bearing my postings as “Fake Simone Zinanni”.

Twitter coverage: Maybe in USA conferences this is just normal, but I was amazed by the real time reactions which we got during the speeches through reading tweets: #bsw2010. It was great fun. Also proving a good wireless coverage for 300 PCs – kudos to Develer.

Cirillo’s talk: what has been impressive of his talk is the sense of concreteness. Of interpreting methodology as something minimal, that has to have a deep impact. And the ease with which he can connect habits to problems, never leaving any space for rhetoric.

Actually just before the conference I had studied the “Pomodoro technique”: to learn more about Cirillo see this beautiful site here:

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Alberto Mucignat: I really liked his talk: “Social design: progettare applicazioni che funzionano”

http://www.bettersoftware.it/conference/talks/social-design-progettare-applicazioni-che-funziona

because (given the strict time limits) he has tried to give us “new product / web site creators” some tools to analyze the flow of social interaction of our sites with visitors and communities. I will try to apply his schemes to our (5!) new products and web sites coming out in 2010. Waiting for the slides!

Alberto Falossi: Alberto made a neat and compact talk about crowd funding – see his  kapipalist manifesto. After that I asked him a couple of questions, which for time reasons I couldn’t ask during the class. I reproduce one here:

“Alberto, why did you build a service which serves all kinds of crowd funding, and not one specific for a certain activity (like one for musicians…). Posting your question on a specialized crowd funding site isn’t it more likely that you will get funded?”

His answer (freely re-interpreted – Alberto correct me if I reporting you wrongly): “You should not delude yourself that you will get funded because a casual visitor funds projects of certain category. Searching for funders is an effort that has to be done entirely by you, building a community. The crowd funding service has just to ease the transactions.”

Second question: “You hinted that your idea is not to get a % on the money, as other crowd funding sites do. Where then will you get paid?”

Alberto: “My service is free. I have not decided definitively, but I am thinking of pro versions of the service, instead of taking a %”.

Peldi: I missed Peldi’s talk, only because mine was at the same time. My friends from Open Lab that were there told me that it was great. We had already contacted Balsamiq people for a plugin for Patapage (here). I actually met him afterward at a coffee break through Silvia, who was hunting interviews for Devineu and has “trapped” the fellow.

He is a great fellow, and gave us some interesting advice on our products even in a 2 minutes encounter. Silvia will soon interview him for devineu.eu.

My talk: “Una home page memorabile” –  actually “Get visitors to read and remember your home page” . I am an inexperienced talker. I had 35 minutes for my talk, and that could cover only half of what I wanted to say – so that is what happened: I hope I made the point that copy-writing is neither a secondary nor a trivial skill for any web startup, but I had to skim through the example applications – sorry. You can find the examples presented in detail here:

Part 1: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-the-principles/

Part 2: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-applications/

Thanks to all – see you there next year.

The tree spirit is the one Godin wants us to apply in pursuing, shipping and presenting innovative ideas through startups and  companies in general. I advise you to read Linchpin: it won’t be easy to understand what is the point of the book, but that too is part of the therapy.

I liked the book so much that we produced a simple online application to help you in taming your lizard brain. Try it here: http://devineu.eu/lb.jsp .

P.S.:

I actually discovered that aereobiology is a complex scientific research field, dealing with such problems as aerobiological probability density function…