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Of all the Social Bookmarking applications available on the Internet these days, the winner for the year should go to Clipmarks, the other one being Mento - really! But I rarely use SB apps - I’d like to have my own, and not share with the world. I know its wicked, and it wouldn’t be called “Social” if I had it all to myself now would it? Drop by SocialTimes, at Slinkset, if you’d like to vote or comment the findings on things social. If you’d like to be an Editor and post your findings, do drop us a comment-note.

Since I rarely use SB apps online, I will share with you what I have in my almost 1GB worth of bookmarks saved over time being on the Internet, which have been deleted, pruned, deleted, added, pruned and finally deleted, and pruned all over again throughout the years. Between a collection on erotica { not porn mind you!} to aeronautique engineering, through quantum delirium and sub-atomic particles and just plain stupidlicious {the ‘d’ is silent just in case you’d want to pronounce it!} bookmarks that never made any sense to me as to how and why I bookmarked it in the first place.

For this article, I’ll share you findings on things art, and social. The Art of Mingling online so to speak, and the art of enticement {reserved for people developers social entrepreneurs who may want to improve their online presence, capturing their audiences by ways of improving their art, and sites!}

• Diana Mok and Barry Wellman wrote a good piece on how SNs evolved over distance, and time - a must read! - Grab it here
• In 2006, IJ. Hetty van Emmerik wrote this brilliant article on Gender Differences in Social Capital - again, a must read for developers, and social engineers.
• Nan Lin and Mary Dumin co-authored this excellent article on how networking could enhance one’s career - brilliant piece to think it was written way back in the nineties!
• Peter Morville’s work on Information Architecture, and findability.
• Conceptual topology of mySpace as researched by MIT Media Lab - Sociable Media Group. The key is the activity that flows along the network paths: the support offered, the information given, the gossip exchanged.
• If you do have a Facebook account you would be able to study core-relations between those connected to you using the Sebastian Van Sande’s Visualiser - Though FOAF filters are not programmed therein, filtering via gender, and relationships are most interesting.

• Working with log data from webservers, James Spahr wrote software that looked at the referrer data and created a site tree. Simple straight lines between pages are not used. Instead all traffic moves clockwise around the map.

• Essentially a theory that explains how and why relational networks are important for the production of outcomes at the individual and collective level, social capital may form a powerful additional perspective for the investigation of inequality questions.
• Mike Gotta in his paper entitled Deciphering Social Networks states that Strategists believe that the technology that supports SN sites should be considered a credible technological model to help guide internal deployments.
• The end of privacy, and the beginning of transparency - The more subtle understanding of privacy embraced by Generation Google recognizes that a person should retain some control over personal information that becomes publicly available. This generation wants a say in how private details of their lives are disseminated.
• Approximately 60% of Americans use social media, and an overwhelming majority of these {93%} say companies should have a social media presence. What about the rest of the World - Malaysia, Europe, Dubai… & China ?

A list of open source Social Network applications that you may want to tinker with, to create your community if you feel being associated to bloated ready-made applications are not your cuppa.

• Create your own expert community or include Spree’s expert finding technology into your projects.
• VMukti is a Unified Social Collaborative conferencing engine. Allows access through personalized, mashable web-interface. Core features include video & audio conferencing, IP Telephony, Desktop sharing, Chat, Whiteboard, Presentation… and more.
• AroundMe is designed as a collaborative social websites {like Ning, Myspace, Yahoo or Google groups}. Each group can create a multiple web pages. They get a drop in guestbook, blog, forum and wiki. Each group is fully customizable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP.
• Clonesumating is the open source version of the code that runs Consumating.com. It features many state of the art social networking functions including user profiles, user tagging, matching and discovery based on quirky tag combinations, group activities and more.
• BW Rox is the platform driving www.bewelcome.org and other social networks, aiming to bring people together in real life. Organize your travel or stay abroad, travelblog, meetings…
• With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there, it is truly one of the most used, and powerful open source script most developers would want to work on.
• Dolphin web community script is a universal software package that allows you to build any kind of online community. With a huge variety of features and options, you can quickly develop your own community, dating or social-networking site
• Being one of the favourites, I’ve had the priviledge of testing, Elgg is an open source social networking platform developed for LAMP which encompasses weblogging, file storage, RSS aggregation, personal profiles, FOAF functionality and more.
• A SN script, sites running Appleseed will interoperate, and form the ‘Appleseed Social Network.’ Development is focused on privacy and security, as well as ease of configuration.
• OpenPNE is a Social Networking Service Engine written in PHP with many features including friend control,friend invitation,diary,blog feeds,message box, and more. You’d need to be able to read Japanese, or know someone who does to work on this!

… and the list goes on, to include some enticement links to cosmetically enhance your community

• FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.
• You save your stocks in .png but which one - 8 or 32 ? and why
• BlindText Generator to generate the filler {otherwise known as Lorem Ipsum} for your mock sites before going live!
• 30 Nature Inspired Websites - It is all about inspiration - clean, user-friendly, and uncluttered! - or visit and bookmark CSS ZenGarden for more a slap in the face!
• 25 beautiful typographic business cards for inspiration! or check out these forty-two unusual cards that will blow your clients’ mind when you’re making that statement! {It is afterall, about enticement innit?}
• Photoshop Effects - or check Stones, and Pebbles, a Lesson in Time Management {A must read!}
• Typography in Social Design & Web-based Text Editors compared! … and the list of 22 AWESOME tutorial sites for graphics design!

… and if these are not enough you’d still need to collaborate amongst your team - and what better way to try

• Get feedback on documents {Word, Excel}, Powerpoint, images {including Photoshop PSD files}, webpages and free-form text and more!
• With ConceptShare, you can add notes and discussion to points on the item being shared, a feature to print a summary - including the notes, a desktop uploader, custom branding for freelancers who care about their image and a customizeable interface.
• Like ConceptShare and Backboard, ProofHQ has the ability to annotate a variety of document types - PDFs, PSDs, JPGs, Word, Powerpoint - and webpages. It also includes email integration, version control and the ability to create workspaces.
• Cozimo is another solid looking solution with the ability to do not just the static docs but like ConceptShare to add notes to video as well. Also features SSL Security, custom branding on all but the cheapest plan, unlimited folders and a healthy dose of storage

Enjoy!