From their interactive graphs to their iPhone-optimized mobile site to their tracking of who shares what items when, Delicious is showing a deep understanding of where the real-time web is heading and how traffic in this environment works. They're giving users and content creators the tools they need to optimize for this environment. Read on for a complete list of Delicious' new flavors.

They've also added interactive graphs for periods more than 24 hours before the current time. Users can highlight an area on the graph and search for results that appeared within that time frame.

Who, What, Where?
A feature we love is the addition of recipient tags to a user's bookmarks. The tags show what bookmarks were sent to a Twitter account or emailed to a friend.

iPhone-Optimized Mobile Site
iPhone users will now get a richer and simpler bookmarking and link-saving experience. Delicious' post reads, "Use your to:read tag and read all those articles you've been meaning to read. Alternatively, see what's popular on the 'Explore' page or search for whatever happens to peak your interest."

Graphs
The graphs seen on search results pages are now also available on URL details pages and in the revamped Tagometer badges, which will now show the number of saved links over time on a graph.

URL Details
Data on links is now available in a much more digestible format, complete with graphs, of course!

Especially for mobile users and those with social media obsessions, this new suite of features seems to be as useful as well as fun to play with.

Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.

The biggest upgrade today is Faviki's enhanced tagging interface. In the past, Faviki struggled with some of the tag suggestions pulled out of Wikipedia because they were too long and too hard to enter for practical use. Plus, users wanted to use tags of their own creation, not the tag suggestions.

For example, if someone is tagging an article about the soccer player "Filippo Inzaghi," they may want to tag it by the player's nickname "Pippo." Before, this was not possible. But now, if Faviki doesn't understand a tag, it will pull in possible matches and ask you "What exactly do you mean by ______?" After you pick your selection, Faviki will remember your choice.

This is an important change for the service because it means users can tag web pages any which way they want, but they're still linked to the structured data on the back-end. That way, when someone searches through Faviki's community tags, all the web pages for that particular item or concept will appear, even if people tagged them using their own personal keywords.

Beyond Wikipedia

Another change in Faviki's service is the ability to define new tags. Prior to today, the service was limited to searching Wikipedia for tag suggestions, but now it has the whole web at its fingertips. If a tag is entered which doesn't match anything from Wikipedia, Faviki will search Google for relevant URLs and then ask if the links presented represent the same tag. As multiple users go through this process, Faviki learns what URLs best represent that concept and adds the new tags created by the users to its database.

API, OpenID, and More

Faviki has also just launched a Save/Edit API that provides a way to save and edit bookmarks from other applications. In addition, they've introduced support for OpenID. Other new features arriving today include a smarter autocomplete list, the ability to convert tags, spam control, the ability to export/backup your bookmarks, and a new tag description tooltip.

The only issue we have with Faviki is the same one we had before: there's still no import function available. That means you'll have to leave your extensive bookmark collection behind if you want to use this service. We suppose that it could be difficult to properly tag and match all of our old bookmarks, but without this feature, Faviki doesn't have the best shot at attracting the heaviest users of social bookmarking services.

On the infrequently-updated company blog, the sole remaining employee Mike Koss shared the news about the additional funding, saying it was a "small round" but enough to enable Faves.com to operate for 2+ years, even without increasing the site's revenue.

He also shared some of the plans he has for the new Faves.com, a site that will no longer be solely focused on social bookmarking in the traditional sense, but will try to increase its relevancy in today's era of the social web by allowing for integration with Twitter, Facebook, and other services.

Koss also talked about the Ma.gnolia disaster and, in the spirit of full disclosure, wanted to make sure Faves users understood the status of the service. Specifically, Koss noted that Faves exists in a fairly large-scale data center with four front-end web servers and six back-end database servers. Nightly incremental backups are made as well as weekly complete data snapshots, but no recent full-scale data recovery test has been done. He also said that improving site performance and reliability going forward would be one of the challenges he has to face.

On the one hand, it was refreshing to hear Koss speak honestly about where Faves is now and where it's going, but on the other, it can easily make one feel a little wary of using a service that was only recently gasping for air. That said, as long as Faves.com isn't your primary service for storing your bookmarks, it's probably going to be OK to just enjoy using it as the new social utility it aims to become. Now the question is: will you?

Smub, which stands for "smart multi-use bookmarking," requires only that users type "smub.it/" to the left of the URL they wish to bookmark or share. Then, whether it's viewed on a mobile device or a computer, the browser goes to Smub's ten-button interface where users are presented with a modest but functional selection of link-sharing options. The service effectively eliminates the need for copy/paste functions and takes a few steps out of iPhone users' sharing process.

Todd Montgomery, Smub's Marketing and Business Development VP, spoke with us Sunday afternoon, saying, "I know particularly people who tweet do it frequently. Unless you're registered on Smub, it still requires you to log in to third-party services each time you share a link. This is something we're working on for the future."

Other long-term plans include allowing users to define and add other sharing/bookmarking sites outside of the initial nine.

Montgomery and the rest of the Smub team don't see the service as a stop-gap solution until smart phones get smarter, and they plan to add value across web and mobile interfaces. In addition to allowing users to export their content, he said, "We're also coming up with a list function. Instead of having to bookmark each link, you can create a list. Now, your friends will only have to go to one destination to see all the associated links," a function the Smub team thinks will be especially useful for academics and researchers.

Although their initial core focus is on the iPhone, Smub will be optimizing the user interface for Blackberries and other smart phones, as well.

LookSmart acquired Furl in September 2004. At the time, the company announced that it wanted to leverage the data it gathered about users' online behavior through Furl in order to create better search algorithms for web search. Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from improving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007. Given that Furl is not part of LookSmart's core business anymore, it only makes sense for the company to offload responsibility for the service. We can't help but wonder if LookSmart actually tried to sell Furl but, given the current economic climate, wasn't able to find a partner that wanted to acquire the service directly.

A Good Fit for Diigo

Diigo looks like a good fit for Furl, as it also provides social bookmarking services at the core of its product. Furl at one point looked like it had a bright future ahead of it, but it never really took off. In February 2008, Furl launched a major redesign of its site, which included interesting new features like cached-copy archiving, export in bibliographic formats, and recommendations. According to Diigo, Furl has about one million users - though, as usual, it is hard to say how many of these are active users.

It is not clear how (or if) Diigo will integrate Furl into its own product, but in the announcement, Diigo stresses that it will release version 4.0 of its service soon. Whether this will already feature some integration of Furl's features remains to be seen. For now, Diigo has released a tool that allows Furl users to easily transfer their bookmarks over to Diigo.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

The user experience on the site is a real home run; from browsing through the beautifully displayed items from other users to interacting with the site's basic functionality. Creating an account is remarkably smooth and the plush, over-sized displays make us want to jump up and down and clap our hands.

Anyone can tag items, even those saved by other people, and you can view recent shared items globally by tag. Recent activities by your friends are displayed as another item in a big box when you are logged in. There's even an API for integration with outside services; though we dare anyone to try to make a cooler interface, it would be nice to see Enjoysthin.gs on FriendFeed.

There are clearly more features that are still needed, there are no RSS feeds or ways to view the most popular items, for example. Roden is hard at work improving the site, he added 31 new features in December alone. The new feature that lets you call in a voice recording is very cool - a message we recorded was posted to our profile page in just a few minutes.

You can befriend me at Enjoysthin.gs on this page. I'll probably be using the service for at least the next few days. Not because it's particularly popular, secure, supportive of data portability or anything like that - just because it's so damn much fun to use.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

According to Microsoft, Thumbtack was developed based on user feedback the company received after releasing Listas in 2007. Unlike Listas, however, Thumbtack does not focus on social bookmarking but rather on creating online research collections. Thumbtack supports both IE7 and Firefox, though Firefox users miss out an a few interesting features.

One major disappointment of Thumbtack is its bookmarklet. While its concept of saving a full text copy of a site is great in theory (though not novel), the bookmarklet manages to mangle the text of the page with JavaScript and doesn't copy videos and images. The bookmarklet expects you to highlight the part of the text you want to save, though even then, you can't actually scroll through the text in the bookmarklet. One nice features, though, is that can also just copy and paste items into Thumbtack right from your web browser (or any other program, for that matter).

The actual Thumbtack site, however, is quite well designed and allows you to drag and drop items to different collections, edit and tag bookmarks, and share your bookmarks by email and through a public web site.

None of these features are novel, but the interface does make using the site very easy. One cool feature of the site is the 'gadget' view, which allows you to quickly plot addresses from all your collections on a map, or to create plots based on data in your bookmarks.

It is important to know, though, that Thumbtack is clearly still an alpha product. Sometimes, for example, the bookmarklet wouldn't recognize new collections we had created or published collections wouldn't appear on their respective public websites. That, however, is something we expect in an alpha product and can be easily remedied by Microsoft.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6a905d98-0332-4c3f-8b25-75737cd9b675&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Introduction">Video: Thumbtack Introduction</a>

Better Alternatives

Earlier this week, we looked at Qitera, which has a feature set that is quite similar to Thumbtack's, but while Thumbtack has a more interesting user interface, the actual bookmarking and information retrieval through Qitera is far superior to Microsoft's product. Thumbtack also lacks any of the social bookmarking aspects that make Twine, Delicious, or Qitera interesting. Not everybody, of course, is interested in sharing bookmarks, and for those users, Thumbtack is definitely worth trying, though currently, we would recommend Qitera, Delicious, or Ma.gnolia, or the Google Notebook, over Thumbtack.

The new delicious mobile site has a simple interface for seeing your bookmarks and the most popular bookmarks system wide for the day, but it's otherwise extremely limited in functionality.

Browsing with no way to bookmark is like nearly wasted time online, and nowhere is that as true as in a mobile browser. Perhaps Yahoo! should team up with Opera Mini to offer bookmark submission in the browser.

With the new mobile delicious you can see recent bookmarks with a certain tag, but not popular ones. You cannot see who bookmarked a URL, their history, etc. You can put together multiple tags, which is nice, so you can find cooking blogs at m.delicous.com/tag/cooking+blog.

For now we'll stick with our existing solution, pulling the RSS feed of our items marked "to read" into Mobile Netvibes.

There are tons of sites on the web that you want to tag and share with others, but there are also plenty that don't need to be out there for everyone to see. You don't need to socially share the link to your blog's administration page, for example, or the link to your local news and weather site. You certainly don't need to share the links to that weird health ailment you've been googling, either. Or perhaps you want to keep private the research you've been doing for an upcoming article on your blog.

Of course, you could just bookmark these pages using a web 2.0 service and set them to "private," but there's something to be said for having the links close at hand, available in only a couple of clicks from your browser's menu.

The only problem with using a browser's bookmark menu - the problem that the Web 2.0 bookmarking services meant to solve - is that when you have so many links saved, it becomes difficult to find them again. You even start to forget what you have in there. With delicious, Ma.gnolia, etc., this problem was dealt with by tagging favorites with keywords to make them more easily searchable.

Visual Search For Personal Bookmarks

While tagging may work for some, the new service from Tidy Favorites thinks they have a better way - visual search.

We've noticed visual search is a space that's heating up. There are iPhone apps and visual search engines galore. Even Amazon got in the mix with their new "window shopping" storefront.

Now you can take advantage of the power of visual search to browse through your own bookmarks, too. (Yes, we know Ma.gnolia uses thumbnails, but it's not quite the same.)

How Tidy Favorites Works

Tidy Favorites installs like desktop software, but functions as a browser plugin. If anything, it's more like Evernote than it is like a Web 2.0 bookmarking service. 

What makes Tidy Favorites easy to use is its simplicity. To bookmark a page, all you need to do is click the "Plus" button it adds to your browser toolbar. Then, to interact and organize your favorites, you just click the "Star" button.

The Tidy Favorites organizer will appear, pre-loaded with a tab that displays your "Top Links." These are the sites you visit a lot, similar to what both Opera and Google Chrome display when you open a new tab.

Uncategorized bookmarks reside in the Tidy Favorites sidebar, ready to be orgnaized. At the bottom of the dashboard, you can right-click to add a new tab. Then you simply drag and drop links from your sidebar onto that tab's page. The tabs at the bottom are very intuitive to use if, especially if you're familiar with Excel spreadsheets. Within each tab, you can also right-click to add folders to further categorize your favorites.

Other Nifty Features

Besides just organizing bookmarks, Tidy Favorites has a few extra features that make it stand out. One such feature is a cropping tool that lets you slice out a piece of a web page and save that as the visual thumbnail for the site. For example, if you regularly visit a page to see your local forecast, you could slice out the part that just shows the weather, instead of creating a thumbnail of the entire page.

Using this option, you could make a dashboard of at-a-glance information within one of Tidy Favorites' tabs. When you think of all the different ways you could use this tool, you'll realize that this feature could actually be an improvement on using dashboard-like homepages where data comes from pre-designed widgets and RSS feeds.

Tidy Favorites is also portable, so if you want to take your links to go, you can add them to a USB drive.

The Not-So-Good Stuff

One feature of the software that really needs to work well is the built-in search box. Using the search function, you should be able to easily search your bookmarks by entering in a keyword or search term, then click "Google," "Images," or "Wiki" (Wikipedia).  When using the Google option, it will by default search your favorites like a Google Custom Search Engine would. But upon testing this, it wasn't finding some links saved even though I used good keywords. It seemed to be returning Google search results, but it was supposed to be searching the bookmarks only. Obviously, this is a critical feature that still needs some work.

Another big problem is that, unfortunately, this software is currently Windows-only. The page that it displays is saved on your computer itself, as its URL starts with your local IP (127.0.0.1). Why this can't be ported over to Mac or Linux is unknown, but we hope they are working on it.

We'll keep our eye on Tidy Favorites for now. It's still rather new, so we'll let them iron out some of the kinks we saw. They still have minor usability tweaks to make like deleting thumbnails from the sidebar after they're dropped in a tab. We think the bookmarks should automatically arrange themselves on the page, too. If they can fix these problems, we could definitely see this as being a great tool for organizing sites, but it's clear they're not quite there yet. So until then, it's back to Evernote for us.

However, the most interesting feature of the upcoming bookmarks manager is the new option to import bookmarks from Google Bookmarks. Although at the present time the browser presents this as an option to import from "Google Toolbar," that's somewhat misleading because the Google Toolbar doesn't even need to be installed in order to import your saved bookmarks from the service. Unfortunately, the new bookmark manager in Chromium doesn't sync up with the Google Bookmarks service automatically.

Google Bookmarks' Potential

It seems to us that Google is sitting on a untapped goldmine with their Google Bookmarks service. This half-hearted attempt at organizing your favorites sites looks like a project that was stopped mid-way through its implementation. In order to save bookmarks using the service today, you can star items from the Google Toolbar (if installed), you can use a browser bookmarklet, you can manually add a link from the bookmarks homepage or through the iGoogle Gadget, or you can click the star next to items in your Web History. What you can't do, however, is import bookmarks from an HTML file or browser, tag them, or share them with others.

But now that Google has a browser of their own, it only makes sense to tie together browser bookmarks and their bookmarking service. And surely they must realize that in order to get people to use Google Bookmarks instead of their current preferred service, Google must offer some compelling reasons to do so. By integrating Google Bookmarks deep within their browser itself and making them searchable through the familiar Google interface, they could offer a great reason to switch over to both their bookmarking service and their browser. If Google went the extra step and made their bookmarks sync between all the implementations of the Chrome browser, including the one they are preparing for Android, they could knock out competition from Opera, too, whose bookmark sync option is one of the browser's killer features for mobile users.

Even better would be an option to sign in to the Chrome browser using a Google profile in order to access the bookmarks along with other the services from Google like Gmail, Reader, or their personalized homepage.

Perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves since nothing of the sort has been announced or implemented yet, but we hope that we're not the only ones thinking of all the possibilities that Chrome presents here.

Images courtesy of Google Operating System

Monetizing a Button

The AddThis platform, which we also use here on RWW, should be a good fit for Clearspring, though it is not quite clear how Clearspring could monetize the service.

For users, AddThis is simply a convenient way to share and bookmark interesting sites. The problem with this, of course, is that a bookmarking button is extremely hard to monetize. Unlike some of its competitors like delicious or ma.gnolia, AddThis is not a destination site for most of its users, but simply a feature provided by the publisher.

Clearspring is clearly looking to expand its audience, but, as Josh Catone points out, it also gives Clearspring access to an enormous vault of data about sharing on the net, which it could use to build an advertising and marketing platform. Over time, it will be interesting to see how Clearspring plans to integrate these two products.

In case you're unfamiliar, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced marketplace for tasks. A person needing work done can set up a HIT (human intelligence task) - the small job they need done. Others come along to perform the HITs, earning micro payments along the way. In this way, businesses, developers, and other individuals have access to an affordable, scalable workforce

Unfortunately, it appears that the convenience of the Turk marketplace has some appeal to social media spammers, who are now using the site to earn Diggs, bookmarks, and other social recommendations they do not deserve. Here's an example:

Anyone who uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk has no doubt come across similar HITs posted by spammers. For example, this guy is requesting someone create 29 social bookmark accounts from 29 sites:

A search for "bookmark" on MT today displays 48 results (at the time of writing) where spammers are requesting social bookmarking of their web site. Search for "digg" and you'll find people paying for Diggs.

Of course, whenever there is a system in place (like social media) that can help drive traffic to a web site, there will be those people who use it to generate traffic for their spam sites. But why are they able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to do so? Shouldn't Amazon police the Turk to shut down these spam accounts?

Mechanical Turk Still Has Promise, Despite Spammers

However, this doesn't mean that Mechanical Turk doesn't hold any value - it's still an innovative and useful tool for many. In fact, members of the HCI community (Human Computer Interaction) have begun to use Turk for user research studies with great success. This work has inspired others like open source advocate, Chris Messina, to do the same. He plans to use Turk for usability studies on OpenID and OAuth. Since the HITs are spread out among many, the cost of performing these studies is greatly reduced. Being able to crowdsource research is a great way that MT can be used today, and one that will have a big impact on the future, too.

Thanks to Brynn Evans, a graduate student in the Department of Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego for discovering this and thanks to open source advocate Chris Messina for sending it along to us.

What makes Iterasi unique is that, unlike other bookmarking tools that just save a link, Iterasi captures a web page at a particular moment in time. This makes Iterasi ideal for saving pages that change over time or pages that disappear after you navigate away (like a receipt for an online purchase).

1) In today's release, Mac users can start to use Iterasi by installing the provided Firefox plugin. The plugin supports both Firefox 2 and 3 and works on OS 10.5 and up.

2) However, all Iterasi users will be excited about the new scheduler service. Like the name implies, the scheduler allows you to have Iterasi notarize a page on whatever scheduled basis you configure - either daily, weekly, or monthly. There are so many different ways to use the scheduler. The Iterasi team suggest you could use to capture retail sites with daily specials, for example. You could also use it in an investigative way to track a site that you think might be changing its messaging over time. You could even use it to track the changes on a site that doesn't offer a news feed for you to subscribe to. We're sure you can think of million ways to use the scheduler - those are just a few to get you started.

3) Another new feature launched today are "public pages." Each Iterasi user has a Public Webpage created for them called "My Public Pages" in the Iterasi viewer. As you save pages, you can mark them as private to keep them from being added to the Public Page. Anything else is saved to the Public Page where you can share it with friends who can then subscribe to it via an RSS reader or by using the provided widget.

4) One last feature made available just for Twitter users is the introduction of a short URL service. Using the domain http://sqrl.it (short for Squirrel It - since you "squirrel" away web pages with Iterasi), you can now tweet links to your Iterasi pages.

You can check out the new service in action in the video below:

Here at RWW, we're big fans of Custom Search Engines, and we use them regularly, so it just made sense to make one from our bookmarks.

Getting Started

The first step to building a custom search engine is to go to the Google Custom Search Engine site. Building a CSE is pretty simple - just click the button on the homepage to start and then fill in the search engine details (name, description, etc.). We're not going to hold your hand through this process step-by-step - it's very straightforward and Google provides documentation on how to do this. To get through the initial setup, you'll have to include at least one URL to search (we suggest www.readwriteweb.com, of course). You can remove it later on if you would like, though.

Once the engine has been configured, click the link to go into the engine's "Control Panel." You'll be on a page with links across the top that let you manage various aspects of your engine. Click the link that reads "Sites:"

Get Your Bookmarks

Now, in a separate tab of your browser, login to your social bookmarking account (delicious, ma.gnol.ia, etc.) and export your bookmarks through the option provided in your settings.

The reason we're doing this is because, in order to proceed, we need to get all the bookmarks to appear on one page on the web, so unless your particular service offers that as an option, just proceed with the export.

Once exported, you'll need to upload your bookmarks back to the web so that they all appear on one page. If you want to post them to your blog or use a simple page creator program to do so, that's your choice. However, I found that the absolute easiest way to get them on the web fast was to use the new service from Posterous.

Posterous is a lightweight blogging service that lets you blog without even setting up an account. You just email post@posterous.com. Compose an email to that account and copy-and-paste the content from the HTML file that contains your exported bookmarks. Posterous will quickly email you back with a link to that page on the web. (This is also a handy way to back up your bookmarks, too.)

Now click the link emailed to you to go to your Posterous page on the web. You'll want to actually click the permalink to the blog post you created, for example: http://myblogname.posterous.com/my-first-blog-post-1159

Add Your Links to Your CSE

The final step is to return to the tab where your CSE control panel is loaded. Click the "Add Sites" button and a dialog box will appear. Paste in the URL (the permalink) from Posterous and choose the 3rd bullet ("Dynamically extract links from this page..."). Then choose the first bullet underneath that ("Include all pages this page links to."). Click "Save." (Now you see why I made you put all the links on one page, right?)

You're done! You can now test out your engine. If you did everything correctly, your search engine will just search through the sites you've bookmarked.

But Wait...There's One More Thing!

OK, great, you now have your own custom search engine up-and-running, but what if you want to add to it in the future? Luckily, there's an easy browser bookmarklet you can use to do so: the Google Marker. As with any bookmarklet, you simply drag it to your bookmarks toolbar to install it.

Now, when you come across a site you want to add to your search engine, you just click the bookmarklet. If you have more than one engine, you can choose the one you want from the drop-down box provided. You also have to option to bookmark either everything on that site or just the page that you're currently on. When you're done, click "Save."

There you have it - instead of bookmarking and tagging, you can just search instead.