digitalcommons

del.icio.us social bookmarks

del.icio.us is a free web site for bookmarks you and others want to share. There is a tool for some browsers that will post any new bookmark to del.icio.us. In the world of professional indexers and catalogers there is a feature called an authority file which is a list of agreed upon categories or keywords. This one  is  different.

On this site each user may add  key word or tag to describe the link being saved. The  most popular tags are listed at the right of the home page. If you want to do a search on a term, use "http://del.icio.us/tag/<word>" To search multiple terms, try this site. One of the problems is searching on a very general term such as "information." The results are too broad to be of use. There are tools to block and ignore certain terms or posters. This site was started by Joshua Schachter who also runs memepool.

Open Knowledge Foundation

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit in Cambridge, England, set up to support openness in three ways: legally, socially, and technologically.

Their support at present is focused on copyright, drug patents, file-sharing, open source software, and open information. KnowledgeForge is a digitally-based open knowledge affinity group but does not have much activity, judging from their archives. Open Geo Data  addresses a problem in Great Britain where access to geographic data is restricted, compared to the U.S.

OKN is collaborating on a forthcoming meeting, World Summit on free information infrastructures  which will take place in London, Oct 1-3, 2005. The announcement is here.