My favorite development is personal online publishing has been in storing bookmarks. I know I’m a simpleton, but I cannot remember the addresses of places I visit all of the time, or the phone numbers of dear friends, or the e-mail addresses of people who aren’t dear enough to call or anything, but…

Suffice it to say, I need services like these in a bad way. And I cannot always trust the bookmarks on the browser I am using, since I could be at home, or at work, or at my parents’ or my sister’s or my girlfriend’s place. I need bookmarks to be stored online, so no matter where I go, I can find my things.

My Bookmarks was an early success, as was del.icio.us. A lot of people think My Bookmarks got buried by del.icio.us because del.icio.us was easier to share favorite places with. In truth, I think My Bookmarks was killed by Yahoo! and Google personal pages. Both services allow you to create a bookmark section of your own page, usually of places you don’t want to share.

But so much for failures. Del.icio.us was the site that figured out the importance of getting users to add tagging to content – a technique that would be copied by nearly every other social media application afterwards. (In fact, a couple of years ago, before everyone was bandying about this term, “social media,” I was still calling it all, “social bookmarking.” Memories. Like the corners of my mind.)

My own favorite site, however, is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon allows you to pick favorites and share them with others, but you have the added option of “stumbling” – or randomly going to a page one of the other users has made a favorite, and is relevant to the user’s own interests. It is also a brilliant system for getting other users who have similar interests to visit your site. If what you have on display is of high quality, that quick, heavy burst of traffic can work wonders.

Of course, when I’m not trying to promote something or learn what everyone else is doing, I still use my Google Bookmarks. Mostly because every machine I use seems to have the Google Toolbar on it anyway, so it becomes very easy to save and access stuff. Otherwise, frankly, a LOT of these services are creepily similar. Then again, how sexy can you really make bookmarks?

A lot of people may say that Digg and Reddit and Propeller are social bookmarking sites, which is sort of true. You are saving bookmarks to content that interests you. I prefer to think of these as social news sites, though, since they tend to revolve around current events. For example, there aren’t a lot of people “Digging” the page to get a U.S. passport, after all. But on delicious.com (they changed the name. Grr.) there are 533 other users who saved this page to their collections.

If you’re looking for more of these sites to check out, you can always go to Wikipedia to find a pretty happening list of them. They’ll help you read more about it.

Yes kids, TV used to be REALLY bad.

This week I figured I’d go off on all of the sites I like, so I can give you a better understanding of which sites you should check out. As usual, I’m not writing a post for the rest of the social media intelligentsia here – we seem to give each other more than enough digital ink. Instead, this is for the lady in the marketing department, or the guy running his own business, or that other one over there who just wants to know how to get started with all of this social media jazz.

Of course, if other people have other services they like, I’m always open to hearing opposing opinions. For now, though, I’m going to be completely self absorbed in this.

Micro blogging, as you may or may not already know, is taking off. Mostly because you get to keep a blog – or online diary – but you aren’t expected to put that much into it. It restricts the number of characters any post can be, so the challenge sometimes becomes not writing enough information, but cramming your thought down to 140 characters or less.

And there are a LOT of micro blogs. The differences between them aren’t always that great, either. Twitter is the most famous of them right now, and it certainly has the most users. To be honest it isn’t a favorite of mine. The system is famous for crashing, because of all of the users but the limited bandwidth they have.

The bigger problem, I think, has more to do with micro blogs in general. They become competitions to see who get the most people to follow their profile, where people send out messages begging to be followed or friended or whatever that particular site calls it, and people you’d like to talk with may not friend you back because they want to limit the number of people they are following or friending… it’s more like a game than a communication tool sometimes.

Then again, with the number of users Twitter has, and Friendfeed is getting, it’s worth it to be in the game with the latest program.

My personal favorite micro blogging tool, however, is Brightkite. Like Twitter, you have a limited space in which to put a micro blog post. However, you also update the site with your immediate location. Privacy settings can be used if you don’t want to let the world know your home or work address, but otherwise you can make your Brightkite page a document of your trips and travels. You can also post photographs, ostensibly of where you are. When I went to see Devo in Del Mar, CA this weekend, I used the service to record my trip. While my pictures were, frankly, awful, (owing to a cell phone camera that is garbage,) I do like having the trip laid out for me to revisit whenever I want to.

Jaiku is another servicer I particularly like these days. It is invite only at the moment, but should be getting a wide release soon since it is a Google project. It’s basically just micro blogging as well, but you can add the RSS feeds of the other sites you’re using. In that way it’s rather like Friendfeed, which is actually a collection of your RSS feeds but lets you post little FriendFeed comments…

Anyway, if you’re looking to get your feet wet, obviously you need to start with Twitter. Once you get bored with that, though, I suggest you move onto Brightkite. Brightkite updates can be cross posted onto your Twitter account, so you know, so if you do decide to switch over it isn’t as though you’ll be “abandoning” your Twitter presence.

So you know, we do file away a lot of articles and tools in our various bookmark collections. If you would like to check them out, please do.

And if you’re a memeber of either of these services, don’t be shy about friending us either. Thanks!

The music sharing site Muxtape is down today, with this cryptic assurance:

“Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

I posted about them a short while back, and I was sure then that they’d run into legal problems because of what they were doing. After all, there have been other music sharing sites that were more bound by copywrite law - requiring the shares to come directly from purchased CDs, for example - and they didn’t fare any better with the nefarious RIAA.

However you feel about music and the sharing of it, I don’t think we’re likely to get away from the problems we faced in the Napster era from 8 years ago. It may just get more hairy, as social media makes it easier to share music.

Personally, I have to wonder that the RIAA hasn’t sued the makers of boom boxes and stereo speakers - surely these devices are the most abused forms of sharing music with people who haven’t purchased it, no?

Don’t expect to see your favorite gymnastics routine replayed on YouTube anytime soon - not legally, anyway. NBC, who has exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics, is keeping a tight grip on who can and cannot air Olympic audiovisuals.

According to a recent article, NBC is employing lawyers to guard its coveted Olympic coverage – heck, even athletes cannot post audiovisual snippets to their own personal blogs. Luckily, NBC has partnered with major Internet moguls like Google and Yahoo to bring online users Olympic news and stats. Still, no Olympic videos on YouTube, Myspace or Facebook? Seems almost out of place to me.

Yahoo’s version of BrightKite - Fire Eagle - finally went live today. I am still toying with it, so I don’t have anything useful to share just yet. Except that Brightkite does let me send my updates to it, which is nice.

Otherwise, so far, it’s hardly a replacement for my beloved BK, but we shall see.