Today we opened up BlinkList Spaces for the public.  Previously, BlinkList Spaces was only available on an invitation only basis as we continue to make lots of tweaks and adjustments. 

Starting today, you no longer have to receive a special invitation.  Just click on Options and create your own personal BlinkList Space to collect and share the best resources that you find for your area of interest.

Obviously, we are far from finished with BlinkList Spaces and a lot of work remains to be done but the product has come far enough where we can now open it up.

As you have probably noticed, we have made lots of other tweaks and changes on BlinkList at a very rapid pace.  In fact, we are far behind announcing all of the enhancements on this blog since we are constantly testing, tweaking, and improving BlinkList on many fronts.

What can BlinkList Spaces do for you?

If you are passionate about something (or anything!)

Here is an easy way to help others learn about a topic or interest.
You can share your expertise, and attract like-minded people!

If your friends or colleagues want to pick each other's brains...

Help each other stay updated on latest online reads and resources.
Now everyone in your group can see the most relevant news of the day.

If you teach a class...

BlinkList Spaces can be customized specially for you!
Involve students in contributing
to the class and learn from each other.

Here are a few sample BlinkList Spaces:
http://marketingtools.blinklist.com/
http://bus301.blinklist.com/
http://brainroom.blinklist.com/

To get started, just click on "Options > Build BlinkList Space"

If you want to learn how to use BlinkList Spaces for our classrooom, we have prepared a special page that you can view here:
http://www.blinklist.com/static/spaces-classroom.php

We are excited to announce that BlinkList continues its international expansion with the launch of BlinkList in Swedish and Italian.  Once again we would like to take this opportunity to thank our community for helping us to localize BlinkList.

If you would like to help us offer BlinkList in your language please let us know and will get you setup.

If you are not happy with the Swedish or Italian version please help us improve the translations here:  http://www.blinklist.com/platform/I18n/

One of the most common user requests that we have received lately is to offer far more flexible exporting and re-importing of bookmarks.  One key reason for doing so is to allow users to do some rapid editing of their blinks, which can be done much faster in programs such as Excel.  Another popular request is to export and import the same file into other BlinkList user accounts to share links as well. 

Whatever the reason, we now give you everything you asked for and more!

We now support 4 different file formats for exporting and re-importing your links into BlinkList.  The 4 file formats are:

1. XML - this one retains all of your data including favorite tags, ratings, etc.
2. CSV - this one allows you to rapidly edit your bookmarks in Excel. 
3. HTML - if you want your blinks in your browser this one is for you (although you can also use "live bookmarks" from FireFox to synch your bookmarks).
4. JSON - this one is for all the developers out there.  I did not even know what it was. 

Please let us know your thoughts and if you encounter any bugs or problems please do let us know.

As you know, we have our development center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and last week we got to experience one of the downsides of being stationed out here.  While most of the infrastructure is world class, one of the areas where Malaysia is really falling behind is having a fast and reliable Internet connection. 

In fact, things got so bad that the Internet in our office went down for 10 of 14 days!  Ouch!  That was painful.  Our office building has guaranteed power so the electricity will never go down but when it comes to the Internet, no guarantees exist.  So, all of us s forced to relocate to my apartment.  We took Mr. Smith (our development server) with us and just worked from home.  It definitely created a comfy and cozy environment.  Here is a picture of us working out of my living room.

By now we are back in the office and working on some exciting improvements.  We are trying to create a whole new way to blink sites that should be far faster and offer a far better user experience.... and that is just one of many things we will be launching soon. 

Today we got some great coverage on Wired News!  The full story is here

Wired wrote a piece on "the social bookmarking" showdown and BlinkList was recognized as one of the leaders in the field.  Of course we wish that they would have given BlinkList a 10 out of 10 rating but to be perfectly honest, I would not even rate us that high. 

However, stay tuned for all of the new improvements that we are about to roll out and you will see us getting closer and closer to getting a perfect 10 out of 10. 

Here are a few highlights from the report:

_____________________________________________________________

BlinkList

BlinkList will likely appeal to people looking for a way to display bookmarks on MySpace or their blogs. In addition to the standard feature set, the site provides JavaScript widgets that show links and tags on any blog or profile page.

Good: All these sites offer one-click bookmarking, but BlinkList will auto-fill the description field with whatever text you highlight on the bookmarked page. Import bookmarks from a number of competing sites. Plus, you get thumbnails.

Bad: No backend API, limited export options.

Overall: BlinkList has come a long way since its launch in June 2005, and if it continues to add features and gain new users, it could overtake del.icio.us. Read the full review.

Wired News rating:

________________________________________________________________

The best part of it is that the bad part "limited export options" will be taken care off within the next two weeks.

Netherlands France   Spain

Thanks to our awesome community that helped us localize BlinkList, we are excited to let you know that we just launched BlinkList in three more languages!

We are excited to welcome all Dutch, French, and Spanish speakers to come and join us at BlinkList.  Obviously, no launch in a new language is perfect so if you have feedback please let us know.

If you want to contribute suggestions to further improve upon the translations you can do so here: http://www.blinklist.com/platform/I18n/

If you would like to offer BlinkList in your own language, just let us know and will add it to the list! 

Mike

As our popularity continues to surge, we are in a constant battle to keep the spammers at bay and working hard to permanently block their bad domains from BlinkList.

We just added a powerful new solution to flash spammers away that we wanted to share with you here.  Here is a picture for you.

Of course we cannot share with you what exactly is in our secret sauce but I hope that as you do keep finding spamers you will do your part and simply click on the "flag as spam" link.  We are committed to keeping BlinkList spam free and will keep refining our tools and algorithms so that spammers won't bother and will go somewhere else.

One interesting side note is that 99% of all spamers use AdSense.  It seems like Google has started quite the cottage industry that specializes in AdSenses spam. 

There it is!  I just had to say it.  We are working on some new features and enhancements that have the entire office fired up.  Okay, so it will take us a while before everyone will get to see what we are talking about but tonight I just had to share with you that once we roll out the latest and greatest enhancements we hope that you too will say that "BlinkList is f****** cool!" 

This blog post was inspired by a blog that I follow passionately called "Passionate: Creating Passionate Users."  There was just a blog post about the contovercy of someone from Sun writing about a F****** Cool project he is working on and he got a ton of heat.  You can read about it here

Personally, if our developers and employees say that what they are working on at MindValley and BlinkList if f****** cool, then that is fine by me.  I want all of our employees fired up and if that means they are not 100% PC then that is alright by me.

We are excited to announce that we just launched BlinkList Germany! 

All German users will now be able to enjoy their very own version of BlinkList which is available at http://de.blinklist.com

As the BlinkList community continues to rapidly grow, we have seen more and more international users jump on board.  This posed a little bit of a challenge because content that is featured on www.blinklist.com started to surface blinks in many languages. 

So, we have launched an international platform of BlinkList and the first language to go live to site is German.  All German users will now be blinking their content into the German site at http://de.blinklist.com

We are hoping to get BlinkList launched in many more languages and we have setup a wiki where anyone can go to contribute and start to help to translate BlinkList available in your language. 

Or if you don't like some of the current translations, just go to the wiki and suggest some improvements.

The wiki is available here:

http://www.blinklist.com/platform/I18n/

If you think you are qualified to be a moderator (i.e. to approve language translations for your language) please do let me know. 

Also, if you would like to see BlinkList in another language that is not yet on the wiki also let me know and we can get it set up.  We are very excited about rolling out BlinkList in many more countries and thank our community for helping us provide this service in many languages.