Advanced feature: Dividers for better organizing bagged web content

Today we are super excited to announce a new feature called Dividers.

BagTheWeb is designed to help you find great content, place it into your topic bags and share those bags with communities of interested readers. Our tool makes it very easy to collect content from anywhere and share it everywhere. Active users recently asked us a question:

I found and collected awesome web content into my bags, is there a way to organize them flexibly?

Our answer comes with the dividers feature. By adding custom dividers to your bags, you can organize bagged web content into sections, steps, categories, weekly, groups, and so on.

Here is an simple guide of how to use it.

Step 1: Click the “Add Divider” button under the bag description box

Step 2: Type title and description for divider, click “Add” button

Step 3: See the result

Step 4: Edit or move divider

See the example bag:

http://www.bagtheweb.com/b/MCwpBz

BagTheWeb is temporarily down

Due to an unexpected server problem, our site is down for the time being. We are working hard on its recovery to make the service back to normal as soon as possible.

You can follow us on Twitter for even more up-to-date information.

An Editable Web, a Linkable World

What Is BagTheWeb, Really?

Since our beta launch, friends and analysts kept asking us about the essence of the site: “Are you a social bookmarking site?” “This looks like a URL sharing tool. Right?” “Oh, it’s a web publishing tool, isn’t it?”

The answer to all these questions are the same one: “Yes. You are right. However, this service can do more than what you have discovered.”

To better describe the essence of the site, we wrote a white paper and put it on the site’s About page.

An Editable Web, a Linkable Worldhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayerd.swf?doc=aboutbagtheweb-100208114059-phpapp02&stripped_title=about-bagtheweb

View more documents from bagtheweb.

Essentially, BagTheWeb is a universal web connector. What it provides is a new basic functionality: linking web pieces together. With user-created bags, originally disconnected pieces can come together to form a new entity for a purpose. This can be easily done by ordinary users with only basic web skills.

You are welcome to tell us what you think about the site at feedback. In the meantime, we would like to invite you to build bags and add links for your work, study, and daily life. Let us know if you have questions, problems, and suggestions. With your input, we are continuously working on improving the site and adding useful features.

Stamp #TED to Spread TED2010 Bags

The most anticipated annual TED conference is back again! On February 10, this year’s TED will start its four-day session in Long Beach, California. As always, its speaker list includes the top thinkers and activists of our time. As academics, technologists, futurists and artists, the TED speakers deliver thought-provoking lectures to entertain and intrigue the world’s intellectual circle.

Here at BagTheWeb, we are eagerly waiting to see what will be talked about and discussed at the conference. We know that the TED speakers and their talks will have an enduring impact to what we think and what we do for a long period of time. Thus there is a need to re-visit the talks and share them with friends. To make all the TED 2010 information better organized and more accessible, we have created interlinked bags for the web community.

Different from the TED conference site where all the sessions are listed in chronological order, all the bags about TED 2010 are inter-connected. From either a speaker or a session, you can click on links in a bag to jump to see more information.

Furthermore, a bag can go beyond the conference. Webpage links and bag links in a bag can easily include background or related information from anywhere on the web. A bag is far richer than what a conference website can be. Also, anyone can build bags to achieve the same goal.

We recently developed a new feature called “stamp.” When you create a bag about TED2010 or see a good one, just stamp #TED, then other bag users will be able to see it by clicking on this stamp. Similar to Twitter’s hashtag, this is a neat way to aggregate and to find bags about a specific topic.

Bagging is a new way to organize and publicize conference information. When you organize or attend a conference next time, try to use this new tool to put relevant information in linked bags. The information becomes much easier for you to access and to use later. Plus, your co-attendees and colleagues will be pleased when you share your bags with them.

Bagging is Helping Haiti

Haiti is still the focus of the world’s attention. From governments to NGOs, from celebrities to ordinary citizens, the world is moving fast to help save and assist the survivors of the January 12 Haiti earthquake.

To do our share, we made a bag, 20+ Ways to Help Haiti, right after the quake. That bag listed the websites of major charitable organiztions. Within days, thousands of visits came. People used it to make donations to charities and shared it in online communities. We tried hard to keep it updated and to link it to more related resources including the bags users created.

Beyond our bag, we also saw that people are building bags to disseminate information and to coordinate Haiti relief efforts.

For example, a user in Portland, Oregon, created a bag to display links of all the Haiti relief activities in the area. Thousands of people used it and reweeted it to promote various activities, events, and donations. Portland mayor Sam Adams was among those who retweeted it.

It’s good for us to see that information bagging is becoming an effective way to help Haiti.

24+ ways to help Haiti slideshow

On January 14, we created a bag to collect charitable organizations active in providing earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. That bag has been checked out by thousands of readers and retweeted many times.

After building that bag, I designed a slideshow version of the bag and uploaded it on SlideShare. The slideshow was selected to be one of the “Top Presentations of the Day” on the SlideShare site on January 16.

24+ ways to help Haitihttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=haitislideshow-100115172822-phpapp02&stripped_title=24-ways-to-help-haiti

View more presentations from Oliver Ding.

This is my second slideshow to support earthquake relief. In May 2008, I designed a similar set on SlideShare for the Sichuan earthquake in China. Now here is the new one for Haiti earthquake victims.

Check out this slideshow and retweet it to spread the message to the world. Let’s work hard together for the great cause of helping Haiti.

Support Haiti earthquake relief by creating bags

The quake in Haiti on January 12 and its aftermath shook the entire globe. The tragedy is touching the hearts of us all. People in Haiti are in urgent need for all kinds of assistance and the world is mobilized to help.

There is tons of information online, being updated every minute: donation/relief sites, news reports, real-time tweets, and more. To assist the need of finding and disseminating these important information sources, we have built a few bags with our tool.

For example, a bag entitled “20+ Ways to Help Haiti” was created last Thursday, where you can find websites to make donations and all the Haiti information, via linked bags.

Users visited and retweeted this bag a lot. A user in Portland, Oregon, even created a similar bag listing all the organizations involved in helping Haiti in the Portland area. That bag also generated big traffic there.

Let’s do more to support Haiti earthquake relief by creating bags.

BagTheWeb.com is live!

BagTheWeb.com is live!

BagTheWeb offers a novel web linking platform where ordinary users will be able to make web links for collecting, saving, and sharing web content. In the meantime, your collective activities of linking will make the web better, more meaningfully connected. This new type of web links, user-generated links, will bring micro-orders to the web where information is better linked, easier to find, and more useful.

BagTheWeb.com is for users like you to connect webpages. More specifically, you can create a link list called bag” for any topic, then link webpages you like into it. Then, a bag can be linked to other bags to form a network of bags.

What are the benefits of using bags?

You can easily save webpages into different bags of different topics. They are better organized than existing bookmarking tools and are easier to retrieve.

A bag is a piece of new web content. Users create their bags to share their knowledge about web information interesting to them. A bag has three parts: a bag summary, a list of webpage links, and a list of bag links. These are written or linked by the user who creates the bag.

Bags bring order to sharing. For example, instead of displaying a URL in a Twitter post, you now can tweet a bag which contains more useful web resources.

The network of bags is social, for bags are linking to other bags. From a bag, you can look at its linked bags and possibly find more useful web content organized by other users. BagTheWeb is a new place for finding information on the web.

Please check out www.BagTheWeb.com