Technorati announced a new Blog Finder. This directory of blogs is organised by subjects, as " bottom-up, user-generated tags". As usual they are presented in "... order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first." The blogosphere is discussing it here.

A very informative annotated comparison of social bookmarks was created by Brian Benzinger. Check it out! Benzinger has been involved in Web creations since age 11, he is now 18.

"CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading." This collaborative bookmarking service is multi-lingual and you can surf the many interesting tags easily. The tags on learning and collaboration yielded interesting papers.

Using the free social bookmarking service del.icio.us you can search by tags or search your account. The tags are now visualised by Vox delicii. Michael Migurski analysis the growth and decay of the 'mind-shares' represented by colours. The coloured stripes represent in almost real time the most popular sites by the users.The intro is worth a read for comprehension.You can also navigate via "Gainers", "Losers" and "Top Names". (Unfortunate titles in the ranking universe!) 'Graphing the mindshare of information' is seen to be a bottom-up activity. Here  you can see what delicious users are saying about the tool.

There is more on CollaborativeRank by the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "Del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently bookmarking those URLs) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings." There is a list of the 500 active 'Del.icio.us domain experts'. strong current made it to 339 (4.8.) but is down to a slack 16867 today. (Via Micro Persuasion)

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is exploring cyberspace. Some of its philosophical convictions are:

Technology can transform education.
The collective wisdom of academics is valuable.
Access to education should be easy.
Credit should be given where credit is due.
The best software is developed by its own community.

To facilitate these visions they provide the social software H2O. The collaborative, mostly academic playlists "...represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event."

These playlists facilitate the following:

Transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools
Share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders
Let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields
Promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers
Communicate and aggregate knowledge -- online and offline.

You can browse/search these tags/playlists for the most influential, recent or the most viewed or create your own and join in.