{Series} Toolshare – Pinboard

Tagline: Pinboard. It’s worth paying for (despite the fact I got it for free!)

As we’re all are looking ahead into 2011 it should come as no surprise that our favorite buzzword “curation” will have a major stake in culling the oft-touted information overload. Whether you will be wrangling data or bookmarking content, you’ll probably be utilizing a web app to assist your filtering processes. As the Delicious giant has fallen from grace, the bookmarking market has opened up to other possibilities. Trunk.ly, Storify, Curated.by, and Diigo rose quickly as contenders, and each has its own fill of the curation market. Luckily for me, Pinboard offered free accounts to librarians as a Christmas gift, and thus far, it sets the bar very high for the other services. Allow me to break it down for you.

The best bookmarking web app will depend, of course, on what you want out of it. Some people really enjoy the social aspect, others simply want a way to save interesting articles for future reference. Personally, I want to compile a gigantic database of all things that I find to be interesting or important on the web, easily grabbed, saved and organized, public and RSS-able, and indexed and searchable. Not too much to ask, right? That’s where Pinboard comes in.

This is the interface - very minimalist.

At first glance, Pinboard looks, feels and acts eerily like a certain social bookmarking site many of us were so used to. The added bonus? Pinboard offers to suck in important content that you mark on other sites. For instance, after scanning my RSS feeds, I can use Google Reader Shared Items to push the articles I read or deem valuable out, my new friend Pinboard grabs those items and files them right next to the tweet I just favorited, the website I just bookmarked in Delicious, and the article I just saved for later in Instapaper. All in one minimalist, smooth interface. Oh, and they kept that old “tag” idea too.

The value and utility of the tags applied to public bookmarks has been discussed in depth already, and compared to other curation apps that place less emphasis on tags, Pinboard gives tags the full-frontal treatment, right there in a fancy sidebar, ready for your organizing pleasure. They also offer a fix to a common problem I often come up against – bookmarking while mobile. Simply email the bookmark to your secret Pinboard email address, and into the hopper it goes. On top of all that they already have an extensive list of upcoming features that look really useful.

Comparatively, Pinboard stands out in a different category than Curated.by or Storify, which act closer to the art world’s definition of curation. Looking for an ultimate, bookmark/favorite tagging content sucking awesome machine? Look no further, Pinboard is here.

I have compiled a spreadsheet comparing some of the top contenders for bookmarking – CLICK HERE -

What features do you care to use with a bookmarking service? Have you had any good or bad experiences with any of these?

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