Linkblog?, wonders Eric S. at Wiredfool. He wants a centralized online bookmark storage facility that he administers and hosts so that the data is non-dependent on the vagaries of free web services.
I knew I’d just seen an extensive discussion of varieties of solutions to this problem; naturally I hadn’t linked to it in a way that was accessible to me.
The discussions were on Ask Metafilter, but site-googling was unproductive because the key words – ‘bookmark,’ ‘link,’ etc., – are too meta, even (or perhaps especially) on MeFi, to produce a parsable result set.
To summarize the discussion, there are a variety of open-source tools and projects underway to provide this functionality, using everything from Perl to PHP/MySQL.
Another Eric pointed out that a paid .Mac subscription provides seamless virtual desktop integration, which leads to the same bookmarks appearing in-browser for Safari users when roaming.
Actually, the deal is that a .mac user’s bookmarks can sync between attached Macintoshes, or can be accessible in a pretty rich HTML applet.
There’ve been a few other commercial services – blink.com for example. For a while I had an interest in itlist.com (now defunct). I believe there’s a python toolkit for xml storage of bookmarks that might be worth an investigation.