Bookmarking Utility That Can Group and Organize Links
November 2, 2012 12:09 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for a collaborative bookmarking utility that can group links and organize links within the groups. It should be easy. We have no budget.

I do a weekly radio show with three other co-hosts on the topic of technology news. Each week, we collect stories from online sources. Before the show, we put the stories in order: main stories go on top, with headlines at the bottom. There are usually about 40-50 links each week: 10 for the main story, and the rest for the headline reporting.

I am looking for a way to effectively and efficiently bookmark and share these links.
I want to be able to
- have 4 different people bookmark links to share
- save the links in a group for each week's show
- easily rank or organize the links within the group for each week's show
- have a permalink to the group for each week's show
- This should be accessible on the web and also by iOS if possible.

We used Delicious for awhile this year and it was a big improvement. Then Delicious discontinued the use of "stacks" (groups of links) and told us that we should just use tags instead. But we can't organize/rank the links within the tag group, and that's pretty critical because otherwise it's just a mess of links and hard to parse while flipping between stories live on the air.
Prior to Delicious, our main host would save links in a text file and then email us the text file on the day of the show, sometimes just 30 minutes prior. That gave us very little time to review the day's stories. He's now posting them all to Delicious. I think he's given up on the tags because they're a huge hassle with the volume of links that he saves. But I started pushing each new link from Delicious to Twitter, and they're slightly easier to peruse on Twitter than on Delicious. But they're still not organized.

This is a long-running show on a community radio station and I'm the newest co-host. I think the show is long and slow and drags at times, especially when we're pausing to look for our links while we're on the air. I try to hit the ground running every week, but that is hard to do as is. If the stories aren't organized, we have to take time to search. If we don't share the stories before the show, none of us are familiar with the news. But my co-hosts don't really see much of a problem, and I don't have much leverage to change their processes. They're comfortable, but it's not good radio.
However, they were disappointed when Delicious dropped the "stacks" option. I think they would migrate to a new system if it promised to be a good solution. But it has to be super easy. And we have no budget.

Do you know of a utility or tool that would work for me? I'm looking for any solution from stupidly simple to out of the box ideas. Please share!
posted by aabbbiee to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Check out dropmark.com. It's free!
posted by blacktshirtandjeans at 12:28 PM on November 2, 2012


pinterest?
posted by anthropomorphic at 12:42 PM on November 2, 2012


linkagogo.com is my favorite bookmark manager. You can save links in hierarchical folders, AND have alias so that the same link can be in several places. It also has a public view so that links can be shared. You can add html notes to describe the link, and add tags. A feature I requested that was quickly added is for $5 a year it will email you a weekly backup of all your bookmarks. This way if the company disappears/crashes you won't lose more than a weeks worth. (this happened to some other online bookmark managers)
posted by anon4now at 12:48 PM on November 2, 2012


Have you considered just using a Google Docs document, and then cut/paste to reorganize?
posted by vasi at 5:59 PM on November 2, 2012 [1 favorite]


Google Docs. It's perfect. Just cut-and-paste to organize, and everyone will see the most up-to-date version automatically. If anyone breaks the document (eg, mass deletion) the document automatically keeps its revision history so restoring is a breeze. And if you add a table of contents and convince everyone to use Headings, then you'll have a TOC that makes it really easy to find what you want. The only downside to the TOC is you have to manually refresh it, but that's quick and a small price to pay.
posted by Tehhund at 6:43 PM on November 4, 2012


Response by poster: It's been a couple of months, so I can report back that we started using Google Drive/Docs as an experiment. I created a Google Group as well, which is easier for sharing. Our main host still puts the document together, but he can share it with the group before he's done with it, which means the rest of us can read it and add to it before the show. That is very helpful. And I can even edit it while we're live, marking the stories that we did discuss so I can clarify that later. That's been nice, too.

Thank you all for your help!
posted by aabbbiee at 8:32 AM on December 31, 2012 [1 favorite]


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