Bookmarking and tagging websites can be a messy business. Zigtag, a new sidebar-based plugin currently in private beta, is looking to offer clean and streamlined bookmarking and tagging. The plugin differentiates itself from the multitude of other tagging services by introducing a semantic dictionary of over two million tags. The basic idea: each tag will be defined, and that synonymous tags (say, New York City and Big Apple) will be linked together automatically. That should make finding your bookmarks easier later on.

After entering an appropriate tag for a page, the user is presented with a list of matching keywords, each of which has been defined in Zigtag’s database. For example, after entering “Apple” into the search field, I was able to choose from “the computer company”, “the pomaceous fruit”, and “the record company”, among others. The process is painless and the integrated dictionary is fairly comprehensive. If you happen to stumble across a term that isn’t defined, you can easily request to have it added to the dictionary (and can place your own temporary tag).

Besides the tagging functionality, Zigtag also offers a Digg-like thumbs up/down system, which influences a list of popular bookmarked sites on the Zigtag homepage. The site also has some basic social networking features, allowing for group-specific privacy settings and sharing with friends. There are a number of other handy features, including “Share Page” that lets you send snippets of images and text on a page to friends through email.

My experience with Zigtag was promising, but the plugin still needs some work. Using the sidebar can be pretty unintuitive, especially when you’re searching for something using multiple tags. And many of the synonyms I tried weren’t in the database yet (No mention of Bruce Springsteen for “The Boss”).

Zigtag’s biggest obstacle is the slew of other social bookmarking sites already available (Delicious, Diigo, and Twine, to name a few). The semantic tagging feature is fairly unique, but its appeal is still untested, especially against automated semantic taggers like Twine. Frankly, a lot of people are just going to stick with the simple but effective Delicious interface.

For those looking to try out Zigtag (Firefox only for now), you can grab one of 500 invites here.

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Earlier today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post expressing concern that Web startups tend to languish after they are bought by big companies. To help make his point, Wilson reproduced the comScore chart above, which suggests that the number of people visiting the bookmarking service del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo, has dropped off considerably over the past nine months. Wilson was an investor in del.icio.us and profited from its sale to Yahoo in December, 2005. Yet he still laments its apparent struggles under Yahoo’s ownership.

But how bad is del.icio.us struggling really? Yahoo execs always point to it as an internal success story. We asked founder Joshua Schachter, who still runs the service as a Yahoo employee. Despite the stats bandied about by his former investor, Schachter responded by e-mail:

We continue to grow normally.

Unique users is not a good measure of our growth, though.

Much of our traffic is through the Firefox and other browser extensions, which is not measured by these systems.

Additionally, we cut off search indexing several months ago, which also hurts the UU [unique user] numbers.

Since our goal here is not to grow traffic but instead provide a way for people to save things, it’s not something I am really worried about.

That certainly is plausible. Whenever I use del.icio.us I simply save Web pages from the plug-in on my browser, and rarely actually go to the site. I’d estimate that my ratio of saving things to going to the site is 10 to 1, maybe even 20 to 1. As long as people keep saving things to del.icio.us it could prove to be a boon to Yahoo in better search results alone—no matter what the traffic situation is.

But del.icio.us has bigger problems. It has not changed much in years and cannot seem to get its 2.0 version out the door. This despite the fact that Schachter’s team of engineers has been working diligently on improvements since last September. The new version looked like it was ready to go in January, but then the launch was mysteriously pulled. There are rumors that scalability issues were plaguing the project. Hell, it’s been so long that Delicious 2.0 is news again (and, oh yeah, the periods are going away).

While I still do find del.icio.us a useful service, I don’t use it as much as I once did. The Web has evolved and del.cio.us, for whatever reason, has been held back. Here’s to hoping it can push out Delicious 2.0 before Yahoo gets acquired. Because, although Wilson probably won’t be shedding a tear for Yahoo, it is not only small companies that get stifled in acquisitions.

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Publish2, the stealth Digg-Clone-For-Journalists that announced a fundraising this morning, is being very quiet about exactly what their product is and how it works. In an interview last week they told me only friends and family were testing it.

Well, it turns out “friends and family” is fairly expansive term in their book, and includes a lot of people who are quite willing to talk about it. As we said, Publish2 is a Digg-like site where anyone can submit links but only journalists can vote those links up and down. It also has a private research feature that lets journalists bookmark items without sharing them. “It’s like Delicious,” said one person testing the service, adding “I would never use the public part of the service, I’m too competitive to share my research with other journalists.”

So Publish2 looks to be a little like Digg and a little like Delicious. The only problem is that it may not be as good as either of those products.

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I know we can’t always expect our friends in New York to stay completely up to date on the latest Silicon Valley product developments. But Silicon Alley Insider’s report on a redesign and rebranding at Delicious is just a tad late. Like 6 months late (the screen shot they show is even dated August 2007).

It was announced and shown to the public last September along with word that the entire back end had been rewritten as well. And the rebranding of del.icio.us to delicious? Delicious.com has redirected to del.icio.us for at least a year.

The real question is when this will actually launch. We were teased in January on the delicious blog but the promised update never happend. Now it’s March and Yahoo is still silent on the issue.

Don’t think I’m being too hard on SAI. It’s one of my favorite blogs. And we have a history of friendly jabs at each other.

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One of the most popular visualization tools in social media is Digg Spy, which lets you watch as stories get dugg on Digg, constantly scrolling the latest links as they are submitted to or voted on the site. Now Ajaxonomy has created a similar page for bookmarking site Delicious, called del.icio.us Spy.

It shows new sites as they are submitted to Delicious, along with a thumbnail of the homepage and a link. You are supposed to be able to filter the results by keyword and get notifications as well, although it wasn’t immediately apparent to me whether that functionality was working. It’s a nice hack that lets you watch the world bookmark the Web as it is happening. But Ajaxonomy needs to work on the filtering more to make it truly useful.

(Read more on the Ajaxonomy blog).

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It’s been four and a half months since Yahoo first previewed Delicious 2.0. We’ve heard not a peep from them since as to when it might launch publicly and replace the existing, somewhat dated interface.

Well, ok, there was a peep last week. In a blog post titled “using delicious on your iphone” on the Delicious blog, they say “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.”

The update may be Delicious 2.0 itself, or simply for information on when we can expect it. The team has obviously been working on a number of other projects as well, like integrating Delicious results directly into Yahoo Search.

My understanding is that the team has finalized most of the functionality and features and is working now to ensure it can handle the load of the full userbase and stay responsive.

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I just got word that Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages (Yahoo acquired Delicious in late 2005). Some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages, as well as the tags people have supplied for those pages.

An example is here, and I’ve included a screenshot.

I have previously written that Delicious search is one of the best ways of searching for things when a standard search doesn’t pull up what you are looking for. After Google, it is my favorite “search engine.” Adding this information into Yahoo search is a great idea.

What isn’t clear is if Delicious results are impacting search rankings, or if Delicious data is simply being integrated into the existing rankings.

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This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

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Some interesting audience-engagement data just came out from AddThis.com, which ranks the top feed readers and bookmarking services by how actively they are used. These rankings are based on how many times people across the Web add a link to a bookmarking service or a feed to an RSS reader using the AddThis button. (That’s the little orange button with the gold cross you see below each TechCrunch post that lets you bookmark to whatever service you happen to use. Tens of thousands of Websites have incorporated the AddThis button—including Time.com, ABCnews.com, and LonelyPlanet.com—and people use it nearly 2 million times a month to add feeds and links to various services_.

Let’s take these rankings one at a time. On the feed reader side, according to this sample of data, Google comes out on top with 37.7 percent of activity, versus 20.7 percent for MyYahoo, and 9.7 percent for Bloglines. Although if you add up the No. 4 (Windows Live) and No. 5 spots (MyMSN), Microsoft as a whole would nudge Bloglines out of the No. 3 position with a combined 13 percent share. Remember, these numbers don’t mean that there are more people who read their RSS feeds via Google Reader than via MyYahoo. It just means that people are adding more feeds to Google Reader (which makes sense, since it is a younger service and people are still filling out their reading lists, whereas with an older service like MyYahoo, people tend to stop adding feeds after a while). You can compare these engagement stats to some old Feedburner data.

On the bookmarking side, in September Google commanded a 17.0 percent share of all Web bookmarking activity, followed by native-browser bookmarking (i.e., “Favorites”) with a 16.1 percent share. Yahoo’s Delicious dropped to third place with a 9.2 percent share, and Facebook came out of nowhere to claim the fourth spot with a 7.1 percent share (beating out Windows Live, Digg, MyWeb, Furl, StumbleUpon, Ask, and Reddit). Again, what this measures is how many times someone actually added a bookmark to one of these services, not how many total subscribers each service has. Bloglines may have more subscribers than Google Bookmarks. All this data shows is that the Google Bookmarks subscribers are more active. Here is a graph of the top-ten bookmarking services over time (notice the dip by Delicious and Facebook’s rise):

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Social bookmarking site Delicious launched a limited, invite-only preview of version 2.0 of the service this afternoon. The new site can be accessed at preview.delicious.com, although only invited users can actually get in.

The Delicious service (no longer “del.icio.us” and now residing at delicious.com) boasts 3 million registered users and 100 million unique URLs bookmarked.

If you are invited, all of your existing bookmarks are imported to the preview, although any changes you make will be lost when the new service launches - so it’s just for trying out and giving feedback. Del.icio.us is saying that there is no guarantee that the final product will look exactly like the preview, since they are taking user feedback very seriously.

The preview shows a substantially different interface than the current Del.icio.us site, and a number of new features.

Founder Joshua Schachter says this is a complete code-rewrite of Del.icio.us. More details below.

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