We launched a new feature for all Silk users today. It’s the Silk bookmarklet: a tool that lets you quickly add content to your Silk site.

A lot of users come across things they want to add to their Silk site while browsing. Doing so used to take a bit of going back and forth: you have to open another tab, add a page in your dashboard, and edit it. We thought there should be a better way to do this, which is why we created the Silk bookmarklet. The bookmarklet makes sure that a fresh Silk page is always within easy reach.

The Silk bookmarklet sits in the bookmarks bar of your browser. When you are browsing and see something you want to add to your Silk site, just click the bookmarklet. Doing so puts a screen with a fresh page of your Silk site on top of the web page. The source URL, images and selected text (if any) are already filled in. You can create bookmarklets for as many Silk sites and collections as you like.

We got a lot of use out of our bookmarklets while creating Silk sites like the 3D Printers database. Every time we saw a printer that wasn’t in the database, we just hit the bookmarklet for that site and made a page. It saved us a lot of time, and certainly made working on the site more enjoyable.

You can go to the ‘Bookmarklet’ section in your dashboard to install the bookmarklet. Be sure to check out the bookmarklet tutorial for a complete overview of what it can do.

When you start a Silk site you can begin from scratch, but you might already have some data lying around. If this is the case, Silk makes your life a bit easier by offering the CSV Importer. This tool can automatically create a page for every row in a spreadsheet.

You can use this for your own spreadsheets or for publicly available datasets. The only caveat is that your spreadsheet must be exported as a CSV file. CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. It is the most common and easy way to format rows of data. Every well known spreadsheet program can export to this file format.

Today, we launched a thoroughly improved version of the CSV importer. It gives you a preview of how each imported page will look, and has many options to manipulate your data.

The importer has a dynamic preview: you can make changes by clicking the little pencils. For instance, you can remove a tag, or create a new Silk page from a tag. If you have URLs in your spreadsheet that point to an image, you can let Silk import that image. If you like, you can preview your changes on every page before you hit import.

We already took the spreadsheet importer on many test drives. It certainly made creating sites like Pirating the Oscars a lot easier! You can find the importer on your dashboard. For hands-on advice, check out the CSV tutorial on our website.

We just did a little dance in the office! At last, we can officially announce the new Silk. This is a big release: almost everything involved in creating a Silk site has been improved. We introduced a brand new design, and made the startup time much faster. We think these improvements make Silk the best place to publish your collections.

There are countless collections of information on the internet: sites about restaurants, famous designers, software, and much more. Most are published on a blogging platform, or as static sites. This is a waste of value: they are hard to browse, and interaction with the content is limited. We built Silk so you can give your collections a better home. A Silk site has everything you would expect from a modern publishing platform, but also lets you browse and visualize your content in many ways.

Collections, fact sheets and widgets

To show you what’s new and how Silk works, let’s see how a Silk site gets made. Consider Dennis, a soccer fan who created a Silk site about the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. As a start, Dennis wants to add information about the stadiums that will host all those great matches. He can easily expand his site later.

To easily add structure to your site, Silk lets you create collections to group pages that belong together. For his World Cup site, Dennis named the first collection ‘Stadium’. He quickly added a page for every stadium in the new dashboard.

The new version of Silk introduces the fact sheet, a place for all the facts about the subject of your page. Facts are the magic sauce that allows Silk to understand the connections in your data and produce graphs, tables, maps, and other widgets. Dennis used the fact sheet of each stadium to enter their capacity and location. The rest of a Silk page can contain normal content like text and images.

It’s time to work a little Silk magic. On the homepage, Dennis inserted a map widget that shows where the stadiums are located. To add some more context, he also added a graph that lets you see the capacity of each stadium in a glance. Anyone visiting the site can hit the ‘explore’ button on each widget and play around with the data.

Dennis is planning to add collections for the individual players, match reports and participating teams, once that information comes available. The richer the information on the Silk site, the more interesting the options for the widgets get. When match results come in, Dennis can add goal statistics for teams and individual players, and show matches on each stadium page.

For now, Dennis is done. If you are signed in to Silk, you can click the follow button on Dennis’ 2014 World Cup site to get an email when he updates his Silk site.

Create your own Silk site today

Apart from making knowledge easy to organize, Silk lets you create any representation of it. After creating a collection of pages with facts, you and your visitors can explore your information to answer questions, or to find new connections.

We really think this new version makes sharing collections a lot easier. If you’re curious, please signup and create a Silk site, and you’ll be on your way in minutes. Your Silk site can be about anything: people made Silk sites about the solar system, things to do in Madrid, all the countries in the world, and much more. If you already have a Silk account, please head over to your dashboard to see your upgraded Silk sites. Be sure to check out the updated tutorials to see how to build a Silk site in more detail.

When you have used the new version, please let us know what you think. Of course, we will continue to push out new features. So keep an eye on our usual channels. We are looking forward to see your new Silk sites!

Lately we have seen more people create a Silk site to hold together the videos they have uploaded to Youtube. They create a page for each video and add reviews and other tags. This way they create a video database that’s easy to browse and can be extended with filtered tables or other visualizations. We like this usecase and want to encourage this further, so we made a new video tutorial that covers everything you need to make a Silk site with a video collection.

We also updated our example page with quite a few new sites:

• The OCEAN project offers a fresh view on worldwide water design problems by combining datasources on water and population growth.

• The Minecraft Silk site features data about the blocks, items and entities in the game.

• The Oscars & Piracy site contains a detailed analysis of the piracy of Oscar nominated movies.

• The Animation Legends site features information about legendary animators (mostly from Disney), and contains a host of resources for aspiring animators.

If you see more great Silk sites in the wild, we would love it if you could drop us a line!

It’s the same scenario every year: reviewers receive screeners of movies that are nominated for the Oscars, and somehow digital copies end up online. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) does everything in its power to prevent this from happening. Andy Baio makes an annual analysis of when the screeners leaked, which we think is excellent. Because Andy made his datasets freely available, we tried to add something to it.

We put the dataset in Silk, and combined it with data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). This makes the dataset richer, and makes it possible to analyze the data combined with genres, actors, etc. The result is now live on oscars.silkapp.com. We hope you like it!

One of our favorite stories to illustrate the power of information is chronicled in Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. The book is about a cholera outbreak in 1854 London and the impact it had on society, city life, medicine, and science in general. It reads like a medical thriller, and the historical account alone makes it worth picking up. But the true strength of the story is the insight it gives into the conditions needed for true multidisciplinary thinking.

John Snow and the 1854 cholera outbreak in London

19th century London smelled really, really bad. There was no working sanitation system, and people had cesspools underneath their houses. Physicians thought the foul air was responsible for spreading deceases, which made the government dump all the waste in the river Thames. This decision made matters worse. More cholera outbreaks occurred than ever before, killing hundreds of people at a time.

John Snow, a local doctor in London, was arguing for years that the evidence for the foul air theory was too slim, but nobody believed him. When Soho got struck with a terribly lethal outbreak on August 31 in 1854, he saw a chance to investigate it. Together with Reverend Whitehead, a man with strong community ties, he started to thoroughly question people in the Soho area. He asked them about the people they knew who got sick: where they drank their water, what they drank besides water, what they had to eat, and where they had died. The results from the interviews made clear that everyone who died during the outbreak drank from the water pump on Broad Street.

To strengthen his claim, John Snow made a spot map where he visualized the connection between the location of deaths and the location of the water pump.

This map represents a breakthrough in health geography, and can be regarded as the founding event of epidemiology. Snow’s methods were unusual in many aspects: maps were almost never used for anything else then navigation at the time, and the idea of collecting demographic information when it comes to epidemics was unusual. John Snow had the courage to collect and combine unusual kinds of information in unusual ways.

What have we gained since 1854?

Let us step back and look at the steps that were necessary to reach the important insights that ultimately saved many lives. First, Snow had crucial data about every death that occurred due to cholera. Then, Snow had the insight to visualize every incident on a map of London, which immediately showed that most incidents were clustered around a specific location. Finally, he combined the data on the map with information on the location of water sources around London. All these steps brought him closer to proof that the disease was indeed spread by specific sources of water, which could then be shut down immediately.

John Snow already had strong suspicions, but still needed to rule out that the outbreak didn’t have another source. He needed to play around with his data and visualize it to make a stronger case. Making it easier to work with collections of information is crucial for multidisciplinary thinking, and paves the way for unexpected discoveries.

At Silk, we are trying to create a better tool for working with different sources of data. If there ever were to be another John Snow, we want to make his life easier. To try Silk, go to our homepage and create a free account.

One of the most gratifying aspects of working on Silk is checking out the public Silk sites people create every day. We already started to tell the story behind a selection of sites, but we missed a place to show all the other great content people create with Silk. And that’s where our new gallery page comes in.

We will regularly add new Silk sites to the gallery. Please drop us a line if you know of a cool Silk site that should be on there.

We put two brand new tutorials online: one that explains how to create a basic Silk site, and one about making a Silk site for your team.

The basic tutorial shows you how to make a simple, personal site in a snap. We illustrate the steps with examples from the real Silk site ‘A Tiny Guide to Madrid’.

We created the tutorial for teams because we are seeing a lot of team Silk sites popping up. We think a lot of you might want to create one too.

We hope this will help you to create all kinds of cool Silk sites! Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback regarding the tutorials.

We are working hard on the new version of Silk, and we are sure that you are going to love it. Editing and presenting your structured content with Silk is going to be more intuitive and appealing.

We will tell a bit more soon! Keep an eye on our twitter account and this blog if you want to be kept in the loop.

Just a while ago, we opened up Silk to let everyone create websites that both humans and computers can understand. The feedback made us more than happy, and we are excited to see the very different ways people put Silk to work.

To give you a better idea of what’s possible with Silk, we decided to put some interesting Silk sites in the spotlight. We do this by telling stories about them. One of the first stories is about how Laszlito made a interactive travel guide to Madrid for his friend.

Our designer Laszlito is from Madrid, and a friend asked him to give him a tour of the city. Unfortunately Laszlito couldn’t make it, so he decided to put his favorite Madrilenian places in a Silk site. Doing this was simple: he created a page for each restaurant, bar, or sight he wanted his friend to see. Besides entering basic stuff like the address, he also wrote down all the little details only a local can know. For example, he wrote down a personal description of the place, whether you need to make a reservation on certain days, what the most delicious meal or cocktail is, and so forth.

What makes this tour guide so practical is that Silk lets you add structure to all these little facts. This way, you can list everything Laszlito wants to tell you, but filtered to match your current location and mood. When you’re in Madrid around Gran Via and feeling like a cocktail, you can use Laszlito’s guide and immediately see Museo Chicote is just a short walk nearby. If you want to eat in a vegetarian restaurant, you can list those in a snap. Of course, you can also casually browse the tour guide, just like you would browse the Lonely Planet. But your tour guide thinks with you when you need it.

You can head over to Laszlito’s story and read more, or visit the travel guide to Madrid directly. If you are inspired by Laszlito’s guide and want to make a Silk site yourself, register a Silk site, and head over to our new tutorial for building a basic Silk site. You’ll have your new site up and running in no-time!