BlueDot, which launched at Gnomedex last Friday, is a beautifully-designed social bookmarking site with a more personal feel. The 10-person company is based in Seattle, and they’ve raised $1.5 million in angel funding from notable investors including former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia and former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade. The site has more than 2,200 users and 30,000 bookmarks (or “Dots”). They’ve been testing the service for the past 7 months.
In many ways, it’s just another social bookmarking site: you drag a bookmarklet into your browser toolbar and hit it whenever you see something worth remembering. BlueDot asks you to enter a description, tags and a rating before you publish your Dot to the world. The rating system also overlaps with social shopping services like Kaboodle: users can bookmark products, give them a rating and share those recommendations with friends. The business model (as always) is advertising, but they’ve also included affiliate links whenever a user bookmarks a product on Amazon - that’s a neat idea.