JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

Anyone interested in social bookmarking or tagging needs to take a look at a new service called Raw Sugar.

In addition to all of the standard social bookmarking features, there are a couple of unique(?) features to Raw Sugar that caught my eye. The first was the ability to add blog content automatically. WordPress and Blogger sites can be indexed by URL, and for all others, the Raw Sugar software will parse RSS to include content. Movable Type integration is coming soon, according to an email response I received.

The Topic Navigator is a set of API tags and premade tools that they have created to embed their navigation into your website. You can set options including:

* specific tags to be included (by default the service computes them for you),
* the number of columns,
* whether to show sub-tags (nested tags),
* whether the results should open as an overlay on your webpage or in a new browser window after a reader clicks one of the topic links, and,
* text and background colors.

Of course, access to the API makes it easy to build your own custom tools for your site as well.

I am pretty excited by all of the interesting possibilities that this kind of service could bring to social bookmarking. I will be playing with various ways of leveraging it on my site, and will report what I discover.