* BlueOrganizer, a promising smart browsing tool
In the last issue of this newsletter I wrote about my reluctance to cover a YAB (Yet Another Browser) when Flock was first released. I also tend to be cautious about covering anything labeled “a new smart-browsing tool” because most of them hardly live up to the billing.
One that I’ve been using for a few weeks that holds great promise is something called BlueOrganizer from AdaptiveBlue, which works with Firefox and Flock.
Once installed (a trivial process) BlueOrganizer is available in the Sidebar and from the right-click context menu in your browser.
BlueOrganizer works like this: Highlight a word or phrase, right-click, select the BlueMenu entry and, after a short delay, a sometimes contextually relevant menu will appear.
The generic, un-contextualized menu for selected items allows you to find links for that term on the current site (via Google) or for all sites (via Google, del.icio.us, or Snap); or via news (Newsvine); blogs (Technorati, Google); images (Flikr, Google); or video (YouTube). Once BlueOrganizer has a context it will offer some very cunning search features.
For example, go to Amazon with BlueOrganizer installed and find the film “The Last King of Scotland.” Now select the title and right-click: The BlueMenu now
Above I described the menus as “sometimes contextually relevant” because the context apparently isn’t derived from any kind of search of your current page and analysis of its content but rather through an index of pre-analyzed sites – AdaptiveBlue says that BlueOrganizer “works in special collaboration with over 100 popular Web sites in more than two dozen markets or genres.”
This means that BlueOrganizer doesn’t often offer a context at all unless you frequent the mainstream sites it “understands.” So, for example, despite having just right-clicked on a link for “The Last King of Scotland” on Amazon, and BlueMenu indicating that it recognized a film when right-clicking on the text of the same title that isn’t a link, I got the generic, un-contextualized version.
There’s an obvious opportunity for improvement here and if AdaptiveBlue can do it, they will have a really powerful and far more compelling tool.
Allow me to rant for a second: If TinyURL can generate page addresses that are of a reasonable length from insanely long URLs why don’t Web sites such as Amazon use a similar system? The Amazon URL above was 142 characters in length which is why I used TinyURL! Here is what it looked like:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_atv/102-2599635-5912151?url=search-alias%3Damazontv&field-keywords=last+king+of+scotland&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go
Compare that to the TinyURL version that is a scant 25 characters!
Anyway, there’s still more to BlueOrganizer: If you right-click on a page without selecting anything, BlueOrganizer offers you the option to tag it, add the page to del.icio.us, etc., and to “BlueMark” the current page. BlueMarks are BlueOrganizer’s equivalent of bookmarks or favorites and can be configured to be added automatically when any page is visited at least some set number of times.
Access to your collection of BlueMarks is through BlueOrganizer’s browser sidebar. BlueOrganizer comes with a load of random BlueMarks predefined (hint: select “All” in the collection field and then click the trashcan icon at the bottom to get rid of them before you start adding your own BlueMarks).
BlueMarks can also be made public and available through a personal RSS feed as well as a through a BlueBadge, a Web widget that you put on your Web site or blog that displays your public BlueMark feed.
A weird and annoying thing my BlueOrganizer keeps doing is adding random BlueMarks. I never told it to add the movie “Little Miss Sunshine” (which if you haven’t seen it is outstanding!) but there the entry is in my BlueMarks.
The sidebar also provides access to configuration setup where you can set up integration with services such as Flickr and del.icio.us, your BlueMarks preferences, and various other features.
Despite its limited and somewhat over-hyped contextualizing ability BlueOrganizer is very useful and definitely worth trying out.
