NowThen

I don’t think this way about many web applications, but I think Indigo is a major deal.
With this release, AdaptiveBlue has slightly changed the playing field. Indigo begins the bridge-building effort that must begin somewhere if any of this so-called Semantic Stuff is ever going to have real value.

I guess you guys have figured out by now that I really like AdaptiveBlue and BlueOrganizer. I want you to know that I have absolutely no relationship with the company or any of the team there other than that I am a very satisfied customer. Satisfied to the point of being a fan, actually.

I think I see where these guys are trying to go, and it’s a place I like. We, the users, the customers, are in control of our data. The focus of the products themselves is on things that we really do want and we really will use. Over the next week or so I will be publishing some hopefully helpful articles about the latest release of the BlueOrganizer addon for Firefox.

You’ll remember back in November I found AdaptiveBlue and their BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks. That’s when you started seeing these little icons appearing beside some of the links and the Badges in the sidebar. Then in December I did a week-long series on AdaptiveBlue and their products. Some of those are still among the most visited pages on this site. You can see them there on the right in a BlueOrganizer widget called “Readers’ Choice Wordout Favorites”.

Last week, AdaptiveBlue released the latest version of the BlueOrganizer plug-in for Firefox, Indigo. If you haven’t installed it yet, go now and get it. There’s a little reading and then you agree and install and restart Firefox and come back here. When Firefox restarts it’ll display a page where you set up your new account with BlueOrganizer. You need to go ahead and do this now, so Indigo will know who you are. You’ll only have to do it once, and from then on Indigo will know you. So go ahead, I’ll wait….

Not Just Another Worthless Toolbar Button.

Okay, good. You’ll notice up near your address bar a new icon called BlueMark. That’s your new Indigo BlueOrganizer. If you’re looking at the Main page of Wordout, the icon will look like a notebook. It changes, depending on the type of page you’re looking at. (The Main page can be gotten to by clicking on “Wordout” up in the top left.) Click on the little arrow and the SmartMenu drops down with links to actions relevant to blogs. You might want to find out other things about the blog’s author, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed, you might want to see how the site ranks through Compete or Alexa. Or you might want to do some other things, which you’ll see there in the menu. These are called “contextual shortcuts”.

Notice that these are things you’d likely want to do when you’re looking at a blog. They’re just there to help you do what you’d probably want to do anyway. If you were looking at a page about a book, for instance, there would be slightly different choices. And if you were looking at a page for an artist or a band or something like that, the choices would be quite different. That’s the cool thing about Indigo. It knows what you’re looking at, and gives you choices based on that knowledge. But that’s not all.

BlueOrganizer watches what you do and over a short time, customizes itself to the way you personally handle things. For instance, you may Always listen to music on Rhapsody. Your SmartMenus will start to reflect that on music sites. Your choices won’t be taken away, they’ll just be easier, because they’ll be based on what you usually do. Same with books or restaurants or blogs or whatever. BlueOrganizer gets smarter, becomes an extension of you.

Assume Control of the Experience

Down at the bottom of your SmartMenu you’ll see 4 options that are always there. The first is “Open My Things”. Clicking that brings up your Bluemarks, similar to the way your bookmarks used to come up. Here you can sort, edit, comment, tag, categorize and otherwise mess with your Bluemarks to your heart’s contentment.

Searching through your Bluemarks is a thing of ease. At the top you choose your categories, and select keywords or tags below. If you want to see all the Science Fiction books you have saved, just type in the tag or keyword. (This is a good reason to tag, huh?) A nice thing about Indigo is that it has some basic common language skills. If you wanted to see all the books by Isaac Asimov in your Bluemarks, you could simply type in “author is Asimov” in the keyword field and only Asimov would show up below. Within your regular page bookmarks, you can search for any word in the Smartlink. And any word can be user edited within the Smartlink editor.

When you hover your mouse over the individual links in the sidebar, little icons appear to let you manipulate the link. One looks like stacked menus, and contains part of the regular Smartmenu. One looks like a trash can, used for delete. The last one looks like a pencil, and it brings up the Smartlink editor.

Each of the options can be edited. You can change categories, ratings, descriptions, comments, even the title of the bookmark. You can decide whether to make it public and share it with the world or keep it to yourself. You can add or delete tags, making it easier to find later. You’ll notice the tabs above that show you can email it or even embed it in your blog or site somewhere.

You can also use most of that stuff to set up widgets, which I’ll go into in more detail in a later article. For anybody with a blog, or a site they maintain of just about any kind, Indigo widgets can add a value you won’t find anywhere else. But it’s not just the widgets that excite me. The more I use Indigo, the more I find new ways to use it.

Indigo is the best version of BlueOrganizer yet, and I am nowhere near finished telling you about it. Be sure to clickback later in the week to find out more. To be sure, I’ve just scratched the surface here today. Meanwhile, keep doing what you’re doing, but the next time you want to bookmark, Bluemark instead.

I am Jon, and right now, Indigo is my favorite color.