Tuesday, July 05, 2005

some del.icio.us add-ons, and a request.

This past weekend, Improbulus updated an earlier post with instructions on how to allow readers of your blog to bookmark the entire blog or an individual post to either del.icio.us or Furl. I have added the feature to my template both for individual posts and the entire blog(in the sidebar). This post on Improbulus' blog has the instructions for blogger and movable type if you'd like to give it a spin.

Found a very cool del.icio.us tagapp over at Feld's. It's being called the 'for:' tag. I think we can put it to an interesting use. The really really really slick thing about del.icio.us is that ANYONE can subscribe to ANY tag with RSS. And you get updated whenever ANY page is tagged thus by ANYONE else.

Confused?

Well, I just created a tag called 'for:bschoolapps'. If you are an mba applicant, and use an RSS reader, you can go here to subscribe. The next time you, or I, come across what we think might be an interesting read for MBA applicants (and you have a del.icio.us account - c'mon who doesn't right :), just save it as a bookmark with the above tag. And voila, everyone who has subscribed to the feed for the tag gets it ! Another addition to the increasing number of ways in which any-to-any information dissemination is being enabled. The first page to be tagged with this - Dave's blog. I think it's appropriate.

This also brought up an interesting thought for the folks over at del.icio.us. (of course, they may already have it and I've been too lazy to check, in which case I would be grateful if someone could provide me some links to it). I would really like for a directory-style-structure for tags. I'm finding that I need some tools to manage my growing number of tags. It would also be very cool if these directories can be subscribed. There are 'bundles' available, but they are messy to use, and I couldn't find a way to subsribe to an entire bundle. Again, I may not be looking in the right places.

What I'm thinking of is, let's say a bunch of people subscribe to the above tag, and start tagging information. There can be overload pretty soon - not necessarily because of the content itself, but the context. Say, A is a subscriber and has already taken the GMAT. She may not be interested in checking out the n links a weeks that refer the GMAT. On the other hand, B may only be interested in this information because she's preparing for the test. A structure like:
for:bschoolapps/gmat
for:bschoolapps/essays
for:bschoolapps/deadlines
would mean that a single subscription to the tag 'for:bschoolapps' gets you all the links that are tagged under it. Would be nice, methinks.

I do suspect a lot of thought is going into creating better tag management systems. This might prove to be a substantial differentiator among the various Web 2.0 ventures that are operating in this space. After all, in this era of exploding access to quality content, Context is King.
Bookmark: del.icio.us

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home