I agree that is an interesting O’Reilly link — I’ve seen it before but only scanned it. It deserves more thought and discussion. I’m interested in the idea myself of how to use free software with applications that run on web servers. What does that mean? I think as important as the software itself is the data — as long as the data and the APIs are free, then anyone else can replicate a service if need be. (And by APIs being free, I mean there isn’t some silly patent saying that someone else can’t access the data in the same way.) Just an offhand thought — I need to read what other smarter people than me are saying about it, including a more careful read of that post and associated discussion.

Otis: I registered for Simpy. The sign-up and importing of my del.icio.us bookmarks was a simp :-) I think the tag cloud looks great. I look forward to experimenting with it and then maybe I’ll post a follow-up on both Simpy and Scuttle. (Talk about a wealth of choices.)

Independent of a specific bookmarking site, I’m thinking about something that I probably shouldn’t get too hung up on, and that’s my tag names. How do I want to handle names with more than one word? Do I want free_software or free-software or freesoftware? I’m still learning about this stuff so I don’t know if this is available already, but what I’d like to do is have aliases, so if I use free_software for my own tags, I could still associate it with freesoftware and free-software so that I’d match up with the same classifications as others.

I suspect I’m thinking about it too much.

Here’s the code, here’s the FF Scuttle extension.

Something interesting to think about with Web services.

Looking again at the site, I see there is a Firefox extension so I think I will give it a try in parallel with del.icio.us and report my results. (Although unfortunately, grim duty calls and it’s off to the day job now.)

(And my comments are broken somehow — I meant to mention that Simpy needs a Wikipedia page but couldn’t get it to post the way I wrote it. Weird. But will have to wait to fix.)

Not only is Simpy free, I actually am giving its users the opportunity to earn a bit of money through AdSense (more about it can be found on Simpy’s blog (search for adsense).
I hope you can check Simpy out and review it.