PUBLIC MARKS from Pete

Advertising widget for your blog or website. MotionMall is a Flash-powered slider for viewing Amazon products, and the company takes 15% of your Amazon affiliate earnings. To be honest this makes no sense - if you simply display Amazon ads on your site you can keep 100% of the affiliate revenue. To be blunt, MotionMall is more hassle for less money. Seems fairly useless.

A browser extension that records your search history and allows you to share it with others. Searching for something is called "blazing a trail" and others can save time by following your trails instead of starting a search from scratch. Compatible with pretty much every search engine. An interesting idea, but there's always the risk that Yahoo or Google will decide to do this themselves.

Question and answer service, similar to Yahoo Answers. Users ask questions and the community provides answers. For some reason, most of the questions revolve around health and pregnancy. If you type a question that has already been asked, there is no need to wait for a response. A very interesting effort, but only useful for general knowledge questions.

Health search engine with tagging, filtering and personalization. You can write reviews of medical articles and and rate the reviews of others. Also features visual HealthMaps to help you explore keywords. Very impressive.

Web-based time-tracking application for small businesses. Very well designed and easy to use - feels a lot like the 37Signals applications (ie. Basecamp and Backpack). Harvest has a 30 day free trial and was developed by the creators of SuprGlu. A useful tool.

Create bookmarks that expire after 30 days. A good way to record pages that momentarily hold your interest. If you decide to keep a bookmark, you can copy it over to another social bookmarking service. It's an interesting idea and it could be used as a sort of personal cache, but ultimately it will only appeal to geeks and bookmark fiends.

Website creation tool. The service is being developed out in the open, so it's not even in alpha yet. New features are being added every day and it seems like a nice tool. Definitely an interesting way to develop a web service.

Yet another site to help you catalogue your media collection. Manage your books, DVDs, games and music and share your collection with others. Also features tagging and short reviews. Aside from the attractive interface, there's really nothing here that we haven't seen before. Listal is a fairly good alternative.

Vertical search for vacation rental listings. Includes Google Maps integration. The interface is fairly bland and unhelpful, and the listings themselves, which are user-generated, are hard to read and poorly laid-out (in other words, they look like eBay listings!). Nonetheless, the results seem fairly good.

Create personal maps and share them with others. Pinpoint your favorite places, routes and journeys, adding your own photos and comments. The interface is attractive, but in some ways it feels over-designed - a vertical layout would be easier to use. The mapping comes courtesy of Google Maps. It's a nice way to share bike routes, your favorite restaurants or places from your childhood. Still, it's hard to see how they'll ever make money from this. Geeky but good.

Social network for travel and vacations. Discuss destinations with your friends and use your social network to help you discover new places. The business model appears to be selling flights and vacations through partner sites. Not a bad site, but not a great one either.

Feed management solution. Create RSS feeds without a blog or website and track your hits and clickthroughs. You can also create a blog widget from a feed and display it on your site. By clicking the "MySite" button, your readers can then add the widget to their sites too. Very simple, but seems to work well. An alternative feed-creation tool is FeedXS, and you can also create javascript blog widgets using FeedDigest.

Social online file storage. Upload your photos, music and videos and share them with other users. Although it seems like the natural progression from photo sharing and video sharing, these file sharing sites are just asking for legal problems. It's virtually impossible to keep copyrighted content at bay, and it seems likely that this would lead to litigation. In short: a very risky idea.

Service for aggregating and filtering feeds. Merge multiple feeds, apply filters and combine feeds with search results and HTML content. The interface could be described as functional, but the service is reliable and easy to use. Similar services include FeedDigest, FeedShake, FeedBlendr and FrankenFeed.

Turn your blog into a printed book. Supports LiveJournal, Wordpress,MovableType, TypePad, Blogger, Blogware and many other blog platforms. You can also choose from three different types of binding. Similar to Blurb, but less convincing.

Classifieds service that collects listings from blogs. Tag your post with "listing" to have it indexed by Edgeio. The service is well-designed and very innovative. What's more, it's extremely easy to use. Nonethless, it remains to be seen how many bloggers will actually sell items on their blogs.

Social media cataloging. Make lists of the DVDs, books, music and games you own (or want to own) and share them with others. Includes rating, tagging and RSS feeds. The interface is excellent and it's arguably a better service than AllConsuming. Like all these sites, the business model is Amazon affiliate links. Although the idea isn't particularly original, the site itself is very well made.

Service for redirecting your feeds to your IM client, mobile phone or email account. Rasasa can use your IM presence to see if you are online - if not, it delivers the message in another way depending on your filter settings. Personally, I find I'm overloaded with information right now as it is - receiving alerts via IM and my phone seems like another source of stress. However, it's an extremely well put together service and I'm sure some users will find it useful.

Online TV planner. Extremely well executed. Not only does it look great, but it's easy to use and you can preview TV shows on the site itself. Also features ratings and recommendations. Add some social features ala EvolveTV and they'll have something really special. Worth checking out if you're a TV fan.

Web-based outliner application. Lets you manage your ideas, projects and tasks in a structured way. Very well designed and easy to use. There's also a Flash demo which shows how to use iOutliner for your projects. Simple and effective.

Social network for car enthusiasts. Obviously takes a great deal of inspiration from MySpace (even the name!) and features groups, blogs, photos, member profiles and more. Niche social networking sites seem inevitable, and it might be easier to monetize these services than with more generic networks.

Real estate site that helps you find a home in New York. Includes user discussions, RSS feeds and Google Maps integration. It's an extremely well-built site that will prove very useful to new buyers. A great effort.

Photo sharing site from the makers of Piczo. Essentially a more grown-up version of Piczo, with the ability to create your own photo scrapbook. You can also add speech bubbles and music to your pages. The basic service is free. Not a bad effort, but it lacks the visual appeal of Flickr and the usability of Yahoo Photos.

Photo sharing for the MySpace generation. Users can create their own pages and share them with friends. The html abominations are even worse than MySpace, and it seems that most users would prefer a fully-fledged social network to a specialized photo-sharing site. (Unless, of course, the photo site provides more features - in this case it doesn't).

Another tool for merging multiple feeds into one. Currently in alpha testing, but seems to work fine. Alternatives include FeedShake, FeedBlendr and FeedDigest.