I love publish2. It’s a service that is very similar to delicious in that it allows for social bookmarking, but it’s restricted membership: only journalists can join. It also has slightly more formal tagging regulations and greater integration with other sites (including, delicious).
It’s a service that lets my not only bookmark sites that I like, but index them in a way that makes them eminently searchable for future writing/reference.
However, it’s missing one critical component that we get out of services like digg or reddit or iTunes: a ranking system.
I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to my iTunes library. I can proudly boast that I own 80.4 days of music. That amount of data requires a certain amount of … OCD attention to detail.
Part of my 'attention to detail' is keeping track of what music I actually like. Fortunately, iTunes has a way to do this ranking 1-5 stars — just like the movies!
★★★☆☆
When I got back and do research for a blog post, quality is one of the first things that I try to remember about a link in my publish2.
I never bookmark complete trash, but when I’ve got hundreds of links related to advertising (for example), it would be great to have the most important ones popup first.
So, I propose a solution. From now on, I’ll be adding asterisks to my tags in publish2, as a way to star rank the quality of the post on a scale of 1-5. Just like iTunes. Just as easy to do.
I invite you to join me in this endeavor. If we all start doing this, it will become an effective way of raising the best links to the top of the pile.
I've created a Get Satisfaction feature request, please weigh in there.
