10 cool new technologies you need to check out

Instant-on access for any PC. A netbook with a detachable screen. And a cheaper way to get out from under your home mortgage. These and other creative Web services, software and hardware were introduced at the DEMO 09 conference.

By Edward N. Albro

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Xmarks: Bookmark Collective

Xmarks is created by the same people who make Foxmarks, a browser add-on that synchronizes bookmarks for 3 million computer users. That user base gives the service information on 600 million bookmarked pages. Xmarks is a way to make all that information useful to other users.

You can interact with Xmarks two ways. If you go to xmarks.com, you can enter a site name and Xmarks will let you know what other people think of it. A rating scale tells you how often it's bookmarked, Xmarks users can review the site and Xmarks will tell you about related sites.

You can also install the Xmarks browser add-on (if you already have Foxmarks installed, the update will be pushed out to you soon). When you search at Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft's Live Search, Xmarks will look at the results and offer additional information about the three links per page that have the highest score — a combination of how many people have bookmarked the site, plus its "bookmark velocity," how quickly people are adding the site to their bookmarks. That information looks like it can be pretty handy in finding the most useful sites in your list of search results.

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