pslasher

Hey guys, the OTW is on Tumblr!  They're doing a cool First Friday thing, where the first Friday of the month they focus on one aspect of fandom.  I've gotten some fun reblogs from them.  Plus, they give away AO3 invites, for anyone who is looking for an invite.

The st_respect  Ship Wars and Olympics Master Posts are as follows: 

2010 LiveJournal | AO3  Ship Wars
2011 LiveJournal | AO3  Ship Olympics
2013 LiveJournal | AO3 Trekstock

st_respect is the Archive of Our Own (AO3) parent collection for the Ship Wars and Olympics, with a subcollection for each year.  The main collection is closed to submissions; add your fic to the relevant year.  You may read all of the works posted to all the collections from the parent collection, or you can read each individual year by going to the individual collection. 

I'm keeping the rest of this information current over here at LJ.

Apparently Yaho put news out on Tuesday that they are laying off a whole lot of people and closing Delicious, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz.  The one that I really care about is Delicious though.  I've been using it for almost three years and have almost 2K bookmarks of all kinds - fic, books, fannish meta discussion, interesting articles spread around the web that I liked.  Plus I've given countless people links to my delicious.  What's more, I have a network that I go to for finding fic and I hate that that's being taken away.  Not to mention the fact that I've got three years of my fannish history dated with each bookmark, and it might sound silly but I like having that history written down so I don't forget when I first started bookmarking fandoms or whatever.  I wonder if the dates will transfer over to another bookmarking site - probably not.  I exported my account, but was dismayed to find that it didn't export my tags, even though I clicked that box.  Must find something better.

Newslinks:  lockergnome.com (with brief instructions for exporting your bookmarks), techcocktail.com,

I haven't seen a timeframe for the closing, so it's probably best to export and transfer everything over to a new bookmarking service asap so you don't risk losing all your links.  It looks like there are several options for bookmarking services, and I wonder if anyone has caught wind of where fandom might be going.  It would be nice to be able to cobble back together a network as much as possible.

AO3:  The archive gives you the option of bookmarking external bookmarks.  They only allow for bookmarking of fic though.  I believe that there will be a large portion of fandom moving there, and I've considered moving all my fic bookmarks there and keeping everything else at another bookmarking site.  I like the idea of keeping my fic and my fic bookmarks in the same place, and there is instantly a huge network for finding fic.  The only thing is the AO3 isn't fully functional yet.  There doesn't seem to be an import function just yet (putting 800 fic links in manually would be tedious) and the filter functions don't exist yet.  For example, there is no way to sort by tags or fandom yet, so you can't search out all the J2 AU's I have bookmarked.  You can find all the J2 AU's everyone has bookmarked, just not the ones only I have bookmarked.  However, I believe that the coders will make that happen, it's just a matter of time.

Netvous:  This seems to function pretty similar to delicious, however they have an automatic link checker that sounds interesting - though I'm not sure exactly how useful it will be for obscure fannish content: Web sites come and go, and they move... Our automatic link checker cares about your links and regularly verifies that all your bookmarks are valid and alerts you in case they are not. And if a web site is moved permanently we automatically update your links to point to the new address.  They have a feature called Hotpicks: Bookmarks that you use very often (such as your favorite online newspaper or your email account) can be marked as "Hotpicks". Hotpicks are always displayed on the top of your bookmarks page regardless of which folder or tag you are browsing.  They also allow you to rate your links and search by rating, that looks pretty useful.  I like the way Delicious looked better, though.

Zigtag:  I tried to look this one up but the homepage wouldn't even load. 

Pinboard:  Works like a stripped-down Delicious.  A comparison of the two can be found here.  They don't have tagbundles, which I really liked about delicious - I've got far to many tags to not bundle them.  They do have a cool Quick Edit feature and they have a network system.


ETA: and apparently delicious isn't closing, but Yahoo will be selling it in the coming months.  I'll continue to use delicious because I like it and everything is there, but I'll probably archive my bookmarks at another site as soon as I figure out which one I like. 

Have you guys heard about the Archive of Our Own, an archive created by the Organization For Transformative Works? I've created an account and archived 3 AM there, plus I'm starting to bookmark fic that I like.

It looks like an awesome archive, both for posting fics and browsing. It's easy to search by fandom, pairing or tags, and there is a filter so you can really get specific with your searches. Commenting is easy, and they even have a bookmark/rec feature that allows you to bookmark your favorite fics and search for bookmarked/recced fic within a given fandom. That part looks really cool, sort of like delicious, but with just fic and all in one place.

Also, they've come up with a system to connect tags that are related, so when I search for 'Kirk/Spock/Uhura' fic the archive also shows me fics tagged with 'Kirk/Uhura/Spock' and Uhura/Kirk/Spock' and 'Jim/Nyota/Spock', and so on. I think that's awesome, because one of the downsides of delicious is that if you didn't search for an exact tag you wouldn't find the bookmark. So in order to find all available fic you had to search all possible tags, and that's just kind of annoying.

So the Archive looks awesome, but there aren't a whole lot of Trek fics there yet. Come and post more, cause this fandom is huge and deserves to have a ton of fics posted!

*NOTE: the site is still in Beta, so that means they are still working out the kinks and bugs. Things may not always work correctly, and the only way to figure out what works and what doesn't is to do a trial. By signing up now you are agreeing to be a Beta Tester for the site, so please pass along any problems or feedback to Support! Also, there is a waiting list for new account creation, but hopefully you won't have to wait long to get an invite.

ETA: There are now a few good write-ups about the tagging system the AO3 is using: Tags (Wuzzles) Explained by Zvi and OTW's Archive of Our Own, and Tag Wrangling by damned_colonial. Plus samvara is keeping a list of bookmarks on AO3 tips and meta. A lot of work is going into making tags easy and simple to use, flexible enough to keep every one happy, yet complex enough to really build a fannish infrasturcture that resembles the way we work. For example, like Zvi said: "also, they realised that they needed to make a way for a wuzzle to be a subset of another wuzzle, like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC need to be sub-wuzzles of Popslash, so that if you click on the Popslash wuzzle you get both of those, but if you click on *NSYNC, you don't get Backstreet but the code for this was tricksy, so that’s not built yet." It's not all complete and perfect yet, but they have grand ideas and I have no doubt they will make them happen.

ETA 2:  It's pretty easy to figure out how to post, but if you want help, here is a pretty detailed set of instructions with pictures to guide you.  They were written with Yuletide in mind, but everything besides posting to a collection should apply. Although, you can post to any of the many collections that have cropped up using the same instructions.