ReadWriteWeb

If there's one thing we know about Web authors it's that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn't matter if you're a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it's important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

As a blogger I routinely asked myself the same question, until I finally realized that I (as the CEO of Woopra, the Web analytics company) had access to all the data I needed to make an absolute determination about which areas deserve the most attention.

Google Chrome is probably the best browser available, if speed and extensions are both important to you, and one major problem experienced by Mac users was just solved. The developer version of Chrome for Mac just released an update that allows users to manage bookmarks better than ever before. (If you're reading this, you should use the developer version.)

Before today, bookmarks in Chrome for Mac were unbearable. Now they are a joy to click, drag around, delete and rename. The only remaining problem I see? Major issues with Adobe Flash. Is there anything else you wish was fixed in Chrome?

ReadItLater, the company behind the Web browser add-ons and mobile applications that let busy Web surfers mark articles for later reading, has just released a new service that will make it easier for you to finally catch up on your saved items. Before, as you browsed the Web (either via desktop or mobile), you could use ReadItLater to accumulate a list of items you didn't have the time for at the moment. This was especially helpful for when you came across longer, thought-provoking articles - the kind you really wanted to sink your teeth into by devouring them word-for-word.

Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you.

When we first came across Faviki back in 2008, we were intrigued by the concept of a social bookmarking service built using semantic tagging capabilities. Instead of organizing bookmarks based on user-created tags, Faviki tags come from structured information extracted from Wikipedia. After Faviki's update earlier this year which improved the tagging process and introduced OpenID support, we again wanted to make the move to this semantic web-based service. There was just one thing standing in our way: no bookmark import feature.

Unfortunately, until now, the only way to use Faviki involved abandoning your extensive bookmark collection and starting fresh. Today, things have changed. Faviki has, at long last, added a Delicious import feature.

Fresh on the heels of Firefox's latest beta, Google has also just released a new beta build of their Chrome web browser. In addition to a number of speed improvements, the most exciting thing about today's beta release is the inclusion of the Google Chrome synchronization framework. Although still in development, this technology allows Chrome users to sync their browser bookmarks across multiple computers without having to manually recreate them on each machine used.

Between self-aggrandizing FriendFeeds, bottom-feeding link baiters, and perpetual Twitter spammers, finding cool online friends can be challenging. Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung created the SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) algorithm in the hopes of separating the social media wheat from the chaff. This morning the two postgraduate students offered their findings to Delicious in a blog post. The project was first evaluated using data sets collected from the popular bookmarking community.

Xmarks, the bookmark-syncing service which began its life as a Firefox add-on, is now adding yet another browser to its supported list. Already available for Firefox, IE, and Safari, the company announced yesterday that it will now support Google Chrome, too. The feature is currently in closed alpha testing, meaning there are a limited number of spots available, but you can sign up to get your name on the invite list now.

Read It Later, a cross-platform browser extension for saving online articles for later reading, has just debuted their newly updated iPhone application. This latest version introduces a number of useful features for voracious mobile readers including support for articles spanning multiple pages, support for sites requiring logins (like WSJ or NYT), new sharing features, and a lot more.

But the bigger news from this company is the release of an API that will allow anyone to build their own Read It Later applications - and not just for mobile, but for any platform.

Zotero, the popular open-source research, bookmarking, and bibliography tool, just released version 2.0 of its Firefox plugin, which, among other things, adds support for sharing libraries with groups. With this new version, users can now easily collaborate in groups and create group libraries. While these new functions are obviously available in Zotero's Firefox plugin, the most interesting changes have happened on Zotero's website, where groups can now create private and public sites to share their collections.

Bookmarking on the iPhone and iPod touch works well enough in Safari, but it can clearly be improved upon. The latest app that tries to provide a better bookmarking experience on the iPhone is Read It Later (iTunes link), which also syncs with the company's desktop browser plugins and bookmarklets. Read It Later is similar to Instapaper. It lets you save pages through a bookmarklet in Safari and then read them in the app's built-in browser, both as a cached copy of the web page, or in a text-only mode.