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Smarter is good right? Everyone wants to do things smarter. That’s why so many products and techniques are typically pitched with the line ” ‘blank’ smarter!”
Well what about using the web? Is it possible to “browser smarter”?
That’s the pitch behind a free Firefox extension called BlueOrganizer, which is provided by a company called AdaptiveBlue. Once added to a Firefox installation, BlueOrganizer adds a button to the toolbar as well as additional right menu options that make it possible to find links and information related to the content you are viewing.
Where the real power of BlueOrganizer comes through is in very specific types of essentially shopping content. For example, when I viewed a CD on Amazon or a movie on Netflix, the related links and information that BlueOrganizer provided pointed to reviews, Wikipedia entries, music web sites, and even YouTube videos.
On more general sites and blogs, the information provided by BlueOrganizer was still useful though not as focused as when on a site like Amazon. The main way that the technology in BlueOrganizer works is by using the standard APIs that sites like Amazon open up to developers. Using this BlueOrganizer is able to tell quite a bit about content being viewed.
Another feature of BlueOrganizer are BlueMarks, which are basically supercharged bookmarks that include all of the additional information about sites that you regularly visit. Users can manually define a site as a BlueMark or enable the Auto BlueMark feature which looks at browsing habits to automatically add sites to a user’s BlueMarks.
Related to BlueMarks are Smart Links. Any site or content marked with BlueOrganizer can be saved as a Smart Link which can be embedded in any blog or website.
To add a Smart Link I simply chose it from the BlueOrganizer menu, which popped up a window and automatically generated the necessary code. The first time a Smart Link is used on a site a small snippet of code must be added to the header of the site template.
When Smart Links are added to a blog post or site, users can click on them to get a pop-up with essentially much of the same rich related information that BlueOrganizer provides. However, this information is made available to any visitor, even those without the BlueOrganizer extension or those not using Firefox, such as Internet Explorer users.
In order to use BlueOrganizer, users must register and create a user name and login. By default AdaptiveBlue periodically uploads anonymous usage information though during installation users can opt out of this for greater privacy.