Webtropic

These little javascript programs can mean a lot to personal productivity and social media engagement. I came to this conclusion only recently, while I am using bookmarklets for years now.

The oldest I can remember of is the delicious bookmarklet. Honestly, without it my delicious account would be empty.  There is also a firefox add-on which, combined with the buttons does a lot more, but, hey, it is simplicity that we are after, aren’t we?

With the advent of Google Reader Notes, ‘Note in Reader’ became   kind of a regular but never really got off. I use it to share things in Reader occasionally, but most of the time I share things either in twitter or in friendfeed. Why? They show up much faster and the crowds in these two services are so much bigger than Google Reader. Google Reader is something like a library: you can’t make too much noise, so its perfect for reading systematically. But when you want some action this isn’t the place.

‘Press This‘ has been around for quite some time now. Maybe it is the second bookmarklet that I have come accross. Unless you want to blog about news, or respond to posts you have seen, it is not that useful. And adding pictures and media seemed hard. For some reason I had’t used it much. Until two days ago when I discovered, that much like posterous and friendfeed bookmarklets, it allows you to easily pick from the pictures of  page you want to blog about, and put them into you post. For thematic blogging it is superb. And deprives you of none of the wordpress blogging  amenities.

For twitter I do not use bookmalets to post, while there are quite a few out there. But I use one to shorten urls with urlborg. Then I manually copy and past the short urls in twitter. Why? Because I am using too many different clients and can’t have a unified solution.

The Friendfeed bookmarklet is a must, provided you are on Friendfeed, and you better be there. Makes it so easy to share a piece of content and spice it with an image or two, that it is irresistible.

Posterous was a late discovery of me. While  aimed at posting through email, does have a bookmarklet too, with editing capabilities  of the content shared, plus an extra area to add your own thoughts- comments. The combination speeds up casual blogging and, actually tempts you to blog more.

One thing I would like to see, is

One mark to rule them all, One mark to find them,

One mark to bring them all and in each browser bind them

to paraphrase J. R. R. Tolkien.

Yes, there are more. Much more. But the above are  the ones I care most. How about you?