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Well, it took a few months, but Yahoo on Wednesday caught up to Firefox 3 with a beta plug-in for its Delicious bookmarking service.

The Firefox add-on for Delicious "now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility," said Nick Nguyen, senior product manager for Delicious, in a blog posting.

Delicious lets people save their bookmarks online, tag them with descriptive keywords, and share them with other Delicious members.

It's only one plug-in, I know, but since I'd griped about its absence before, it's only fair for me to call out its availability for download now.

Firefox has a wealth of plug-ins to extend its abilities, but several don't work on Firefox 3, which is still in beta. Delicious is one very widely used tool, so the new plug-in should help lower barriers significantly.

The new plug-in also has a handful of features. None struck me as major, though the low-profile "classic mode" sounds promising; check the blog for a list.

I don't get it.

We have all manner of Web 2.0 properties to cater to just about every sort of online need. I'm not going to name any specific site--any such would be either completely obscure or wildly controversial--but you know what I mean.

However, bookmarking seems to have remained a backwater. There are apparently a lot of sites that are connected with bookmarking in some way. (See, for example, the bookmarking category on this list.) However, the best one can say is that no newcomer has gained any real traction and the sort-of-known--at least within the geek crowd--have done remarkably little over the past few years. In fact, I'm struck that essentially nothing has changed since this 2004 James Governor post. 3+ years is an eternity in Web 2.0.

A del.icio.us 2.0 is in preview; perhaps that will make this discussion moot. The oddly-named del.icio.us certainly appears to be the best-known and have the most critical mass of the social book mark sites. It's just that it hasn't changed in ages. (It's a Yahoo property, story sound familiar?)

From my perspective, the social aspect of these sites is almost secondary. Yes, there are a few friends whose bookmarks I keep an eye on. And, when tagging, seeing what the "crowd" has used as tagging terms can help you stay consistent. But I don't view the storage of bookmarks as primarily a social or sharing activity.

I mostly use del.icio.us to store bookmarks for my own use and to generate blog posts such as this one. Today, that means dealing with homemade scripts and a strictly limited number of characters in the comments or notes about a link. Nor does del.icio.us provide any real organizational tools to easily consolidate or change tags.

In short, bookmarking is such an obvious "cloud" application; a bookmark isn't much use without an Internet connection. (Permanently saving the content of pages is another topic that I view as largely independent of this one.) Yet it's an application space that has been poorly served by "Web 2.0" to date.

Google is sneaky. It has quietly launched a new service that lets people share bookmarks. It is called Google Shared Stuff.

To get started, you drag an "Email/Share" button to your browser toolbar. When you click on the button, you have the option of e-mailing the link or a preview of the Web page you are visiting to someone, sharing it on Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Furl, Social Poster or Reddit, or posting it to a Shared Stuff page.

You can keep track of bookmarks that your Gmail contacts have shared and see popular links, as well as subscribe to feeds for the pages. You also can add comments and tags to the items and upload a profile photo from Picasa.

Google Bookmarks has been around for awhile. This new feature adds the "social media" component that other bookmark services have.

Tip of the hat to the Google Operating System blog for being among the first, if not the first, to report on this.

Google's Shared Stuff feature lets you send links to social networks and other sites.

(Credit: Google)

Shared bookmarks can be sent to others via e-mail.

(Credit: Google)

How do you deal with all the clutter on the Internet? A new Web site that launched on Thursday purports to help you separate the wheat from the chaff with a directory of popular sites for various search categories, but there doesn't seem to be much to it.

The site, which sports the cutesy name of Cludr, features a Google search box and a list of 18 categories including "dating," "health," "investments," "music," "news," "shopping," "search" and "Yellow Pages." Behind the links are lists of the most popular Web sites in each of the categories.

Cludr is a new Web directory.

(Credit: Cludr)

A company spokesman called Cludr a Web directory. But it's a far cry from traditional directories such as Yahoo Directory, which offers a lot more than just lists of sites, or even the very comprehensive Open Directory Project.

To me it seems like a very simple but organized list of bookmarks. Surprisingly in this user-generated content mad environment, it has none of the social media elements of popular bookmark sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon.

The site is powered by Google search and features Google ads, but with fewer ads and no video, news, image or video links.

A company news release quoted a happy customer who said, "Nothing gets in your way."

Yeah, definitely not the features.

VentureBeat reported this evening that "an inside source" had informed them that Forbes Magazine--home publication of the now-outed Fake Steve Jobs--has acquired Clipmarks, a New York-based start-up that allows users to share snippets and bits of Web pages rather than simply a hyperlink or an entire article. This is done through a downloadable browser plug-in that enables "highlighting" up to a certain amount of text on a site.

A look at Clipmarks' downloadable 'highlighting' features.

(Credit: Clipmarks)

No financial details were provided, but VentureBeat's Eric Eldon wrote that "Forbes finds the service useful for helping their reporters collect and share information about articles they are reading--and you may soon be seeing Clipmarks used in their stories and blogposts. They'll clip something, and then blog something quickly around it."

Clipmarks representatives were quick to respond to the rumors, and they were strikingly candid. Founder Eric Goldstein addressed the matter (how else?) by "clipping" it and then commenting on the shared text to clarify: "This article is a bit premature," Goldstein wrote. "We have not been acquired by Forbes. However, for the past few months we have been meeting with people at all levels of Forbes and the excitement and support they have shown for what we're creating has been very meaningful to us."

But don't count an acquisition out just yet, Goldstein hinted: "In the coming weeks i hope/expect to have a more definitive announcement about our relationship." Meanwhile, Clipmarks evangelist Eric Skiff had this to say in his Twitter feed: "Wow! I go away on vacation for a few days, and our big news leaks!...Clipmarks + Forbes = <3."

Keep an eye on this one.

BOSTON, Mass.--Blackboard, an educational software company, announced a social-networking site for students and professors on Tuesday at its BbWorld '07 conference.

Scholar, the social bookmarking site that Blackboard launched in January, works much like Delicious in that people can see links relevant to articles based on their tagged interests. Scholar is centrally hosted by Blackboard and integrates with any schools or users who subscribe to Blackboard applications.

The company is now expanding Scholar into a social-networking site where researchers of even the most obscure topics can find each other.

As in other social-networking sites, there are different levels of "friendship."

Professors, for example, may not want all their students to have access to their personal profile as friends, but can opt to allow them to be fans and follow their research. The same goes for students or graduate researchers who want to follow the research of others in their field.

Profiles can be set so that bookmarks and other updating features can be seen by the public, Scholar account holders only, fans or only friends. Scholar also allows you to see who's tracking your profile activity.

The site, which already offers RSS feed features, will now allow RSS feeds or links to be filtered directly to a Blackboard course site homepage. Students can tag bookmarks they find via Scholar to be sent to their course site, and faculty can send entire bookmark collections for one course.

The new social-networking aspect, which is part of Blackboard's Beyond Initiative to offer more Web 2.0 tools, will go live in time for back-to-school.

The site and its features will be open to all Blackboard users, who are then allowed to maintain their Scholar account even after they graduate or take a new job at another university.