I arrived in Transnistria on the happiest day of the year - May 25, the last day of school. Packs of happy, singing students were wandering the streets, the boys dressed in suits or nice shirts and the girls wearing a kind of folk costume that combined apron, scrunchies, stockings and a disturbingly short UPS …

These are lean times in social bookmarking. The staff at del.icio.us has been eviscerated by layoffs, and the project is now being run by a skeleton crew. Magnolia, the other useful bookmarking site, has gone offline for the summer while it implements a new "don't irretrievably lose everyone's data" feature.

I was…