I bought an iPad Friday night. I browsed all night exploring Flipboard and reading the digital magazines I subscribed to with Zinio. I loved it! By Sunday night, I was ready to bring back my iPad to the Apple store due to the lack of support for decent bookmarking and sharing tools.

As a curator, I depend a lot on bookmarklets to do my job. A bookmarklet is a one-click functionality that you typically drag to the toolbar of your browser. Good examples are “Shorten with bit.ly”, or “Bookmark on Delicious”. Sadly, you cannot add bookmarklets to the Safari browser running on your iPhone or iPad.

Like I said, I depend on bookmarklets to easily share must-read articles. I used a custom URL shortener (via Bitly.Pro) to share links. And I bookmark ideas and research materials for future articles on Delicious. These simple tasks done on a computer suddenly become cumbersome to do on an iPad. Therefore, I was ready to give up when my geek husband found me a solution. It is not perfect but it greatly reduces the burden of these tasks on the iPad.

The trick is to create a bookmark and then, to paste the proper Javascript as the URL. I wish to send a HUGE thank to Chris Bray for compiling the different Javascript and sharing his neat trick. So far, Chris shared how to run 16 bookmarkets on your iPad. But frankly, I cannot understand why Apple brings us back to the dark ages by not supporting bookmarklets on the iPad.

+ Adding bookmarklets on iPad by Chris Bray

A trend that I predict since 2008 has been validated by Sysomos: women blog more than men, even it is by a tiny margin. And it  is similar to the gender spread in the overall population. I have been advocating that the Web will be populated more and more by women and that fact will change the nature of the Web. The rise in women participation online is due to the advent of social media and a wide access to easy to use publishing tools.

Let’s look at the statistics from an analysis of more than 100 million blog posts done by Sysomos.com for a study published June 2010. We can get a better grasp of the current state of the blogosphere by noting that:

• Bloggers aged between 21 to 35 years old account for 53.3% of the total blogging population
• 50.9% of bloggers are women
• Almost 30% of bloggers are from the USA, 6.75% live in UK, 4.9% are in Japan and Canada arrived fifth with 3.9%
• The study confirmed what I already knew, looking at my regional statistics. California is the US state with most bloggers (14%), followed by New York at 7% and Ontario ranked third (5.6%) before Colorado and Texas.
• More than half of the tweets come from U.S. Twitter users, while only a third of blog posts are from the USA. Find more data about Twitter demographics around the World (January 2010).

+ Get all the details at Inside Blog Demographics by Sysomos