Building a Better Public Garden: The Ability to Digg and Share Things del.icio.us

Back in the days when people spent more time on AOL each day than the most popular websites online, experts often debated the benefits of a "walled garden" like AOL vs. those of the free and unfettered (and therefore unregulated and, at times, broken or confusing) Internet.  Those writing often claimed that the walled gardens provided an easier-to-understand experience, community standards that protected those inside the garden, and tools, services, and information that might not be replicated outside.  They also allowed easy communication and connection with those inside the garden.  The benefits of the open Internet were that it allowed the creativity, technical prowess, and business skills of millions to come to life.  Anyone could create a web service.  Anyone could build a website.  Anyone could open a store (or sell on eBay).  It also allowed, with email and the development of increasingly easy-to-use Internet-based chat tools, people to communicate wherever they were browsing.

When Gather first launched, many assumed that we were building another "walled garden," this time using Internet tools to create and AOL-like experience.  The use of the word "members" to described people who had become active parts of the Gather platform may have been the root of this assumption.  In any case, people expected that we were building another service, cut-off from the biosphere of the Internet, isolating its members in an attempt to protect them.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, the "walled garden" vs. web description is a false dichotomy.  What we are building here is akin to a public garden, or an open space, available to anyone, that is planted, maintained, well lighted, and integrated into the community that surrounds it. 

This is nothing new.  Gather has always been different from AOL and, in fact, from many other services online.  Unlike most community spaces, here on Gather you have always had the ability to share your content not just with other Gatherers, but with the world (if you so choose).  You have, since we launched the service publicly, always been able to link to content that is off-Gather (whether to the writing of people with stand-alone blogs or to news stories, recipes, or images in traditional media).  And anyone has always had the ability to join the Gather community, free of charge.  We have, at the same time, taken steps to make sure that this public garden of ours is attractively planted, maintained, and well lighted for those that come to spend time here.

Last night, we took steps to enhance the connection of our public garden to the broader Internet community that surrounds it. We are pleased to announce several new features designed to help integrate Gather content into the blogosphere: the addition of social bookmarking tools Digg and del.icio.ous and the addition of permalinks to articles and images.  Others, including the ability to share content via a technology called RSS, are on the way. 

Social bookmarking has become a popular and effective way of organizing information on the web to make it more accessible.  A bookmark is simply a link to an item on the web, along with information that helps the community categorize it.  Social bookmarking sites facilitate finding popular content by organizing these links topically or by counting the number of links to a particular item to show their popularity.  Bookmarking high quality content on Gather on these services helps others, across the Internet, to find the best content by your fellow Gatherers more frequently.  It helps our best authors reach a broader audience as well.

We have added buttons to Gather articles to make it easy to bookmark them on two of the major sites, digg.com and del.icio.us. To submit a Gather article to one of these sites, just click on the relevant Digg or del.icio.us button located above and below an article. You will be taken to a submission form on the site you have selected, where information to the Gather article you want to bookmark may already be filled in. Simply complete the remainder of the form and the article will be bookmarked! Note that these sites do require registration the first time you submit to them. While digg.com is only for bookmarking articles, del.icio.us also bookmarks images, so you will find del.icio.us buttons on all Gather images as well.

Digg.com and del.icio.us are only two of the many social bookmarking sites on the web.  A few months ago, the Gather community helped design a recommendations system to replace ratings.  When we launch that service this fall, it will also create our own social bookmarking service for you.

We ask all Gather users to be good netizens when submitting content to bookmarking sites. Please make sure the bookmarks you create are of general interest and good quality.  Also, never submit any Gather content that has restricted access. This includes content marked adult, or content that is published only to private groups or connections.

In addition to creating social bookmarks, offsite bloggers had been requesting we add "permalinks" the content on Gather making it easier for them to link to your work. A permalink is simply a web address, or URL, that will always point to Gather item, even as our site grows and changes. To obtain a permalink for an article or image and use it in an article, find the "permalink" button above or below the article or image, right-click (control-click for Apple users) it, and select "copy shortcut" (Internet Explorer), "copy link location" (Firefox), or "copy link" (Safari) from the menu.  You can then paste it into our publishing tool to link to offsite blogger content.  This will work for permalinks that you find on Gather and off.

Both of these steps are important ones in better integrating Gather into the broader web community that surrounds us.  Social bookmarking, in particular, will help Gather's best writers to be read by an increasing number of people across the web, as the hundreds of thousands of Gather readers each month find and identify their work for those browsing offsite.  We hope you will use these tools responsibly to identify good content here and look forward to helping you connect and share with a community that grows more vibrant every day.  We look forward to building additional tools, with your help and guidance, which bring more value to this public garden and the broader Internet community in the days and weeks to come.

Thanks for helping build a better Gather.

Tom Gerace is founder and CEO of Gather.com