del.icio.us blocks "for:bschoolapps"-type tag sharing ???

start:rant

this blows.

i have been playing around with the for:bschoolapps tag that I had created a few days - also noticed that Andy and ClearAdmit had tagged links with it. Subscribed to the RSS feed and things seemed to be pretty cool. I was going to post on BW and s2s, as suggested by Andy, to spread the word for those interested. And, now, all of a sudden I can't access the page for the tag ! it's the same with any tags, like 'for:joshua'.

the cool (not so much anymore, i guess) thing about del.icio.us is that tags have their own pages. which means that you can go see every site that's been tagged with that word, in addition to your own. Take, for instance, the tag 'podcasting'.

My main page is here:
http://del.icio.us/poweryogi
My page for all my links tagged as podcasting is:
http://del.icio.us/poweryogi/podcasting
Now you can go and check out 'all' links tagged as podcasting here:
http://del.icio.us/tag/podcasting

Ingeniously simple way of finding things. The new tag that I created had, obviously, the page:
http://del.icio.us/tag/for:bschoolapps
It was working fine, I had an RSS feed, the entire 4thofjuly fireworks.
If you click on the page for the tag now, it redirects to:
http://del.icio.us/for/bschoolapps with the message:
You have to be logged in as bschoolapps to view this page.

i 'think' I know what's going on here. in his latest post on their blog, joshua talked about how del.icio.us is now automatically starting to assign system tags to certain filetypes. The interesting thing is what the tags look like. For eg, an mp3 file is going to be tagged system:filetype:mp3.

this suggests to me that the colon(:) is starting to assume some special meaning in del.icio.us' tag nomenclature. the error warning also suggests that 'for:bschoolapps' can no longer be considered a tag per se. the 'for:' is more likely a redirector to a page for the user 'bschoolapps'. pretty big change, and one that isn't really documented anywhere.

now, i understand i wasn't trying to do anything that a simple tag called 'for_bschoolapps' wouldn't do. and i do understand it's a pre-alpha-alpha version subject to continuous change. and i also read their note that they can expel anyone who misbehaves. even at that risk, i must complain that what seems like a new model of tagging shouldn't be implemented without some kind of warning/info for those already using the tags in a particular way - there's the about page, and a blog to talk about impending changes. I mean, we're pre-alpha-alpha users too and could use a little heads-up.

of course, you'll have to pardon me if this was just a bug. i am not very generous with my bug reports :-)

end:rant

EDIT: just got an email from joshua that they are actually rolling out the support for the enhanced for: tag TODAY and that he didn't have the time to formulate the blog post yet. I guess I caught it just at the wrong time. The blog post is here. Sorry if I jumped the gun. Got to love that they are so responsive and listening to customers. Pretty awesome.