to "smuggy" from lookinsmart .....

Smuggler,

I really think you should take a fresh look at social bookmarking, and the implications for those companies who adopt the technology early on.

Looksmart have been incredibly sharp on this one. Basically what furl gives them is:

1. A viral way of capturing loyal and proprietory traffic. This concept is growing as fast as blogging. People are happily recommending furl and powering their blogs and sites by it. Do yourself a favour and look at the following Google searches:

"Generated by furl" (include the quotes)
"Powered by furl"
"Provided by furl"

You will see that bloggers are already embracing furl, and happily linking / recommending it.

Each time furl powers / generates / provides pages, Looksmart can provide contextual advertisements alongside, seed search ads where relevant etc etc

2. Free contextual / editorial tagging

One of the problems Google and other crawled SEs have is that the only way the can classify a page is by the words on it and the pages that link to it. There is no way a crawler can give the page context other than by what is on the page and those linking to it. Looksmart's need to seed their search
results with human edited directory entries shows this.

However, when a furl user adds a page to their personal archive, they put words alongside (tag) it to allow them to intuitively find that page easily again. These words may or may not appear within the page itself, and they give a human deduced meaning to the page. When the same page is furled by different users, common tags can be recognized and validate each other. Looksmart seem to be seeding that back into their search algorithms within the furl search page, which will with time give them superior relevancy, not only in their furl search but all their other search platforms too.

Recall Looksmart's human edited directory was always considered superior in quality to the crawled searches, but just could not scale since editors were required. Even zeal required considerable effort on behalf of webmasters.

Furl lets users do the work inadvertantly whilst providing a service.

Webmasters are already cottoning on to this e.g. see .....

http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/post-1683.html&sid=eb97f3efc215c3ea2df2d9d1
539dd829

3. Eventual monetisation of bookmark/links pages.

There are three main ways you reach a website for the first time:

1. Type the URL directly

2. Use a search engine

3. Link from another site.

#1 is not monetised by looksmart, and generally only monetised via adverts for the URL itself, and not necessarily advertised online.

#2 is monetised by paid placement, and paid inclusion.

#3 is not yet widely monetised. Furl allows link pages be provided by furl to be monetised down the line. Once a site is getting significant traffic from furl generated pages, LOOK will be in a position to
charge for that traffic.

Smuggler, I know we have had our ups and downs in the past, but I am dead serious about this one - Furl is a big deal for Looksmart, and given that they have already integrated it across their sites I think we can safely say they are well on the way to a huge market.

Do yourself a favour and get in while you still can - once the news articles start flowing about social bookmarking (driven by the webmaster community) as they have about blogging, the market will see the potential.

And I don't think that is far off.

Cheers
"Lookin"