Slashdot Mirror

Not likely. The page got pretty high up on the del.icio.us popular list early yesterday, and I assume it traveled to Slashdot from there.

I was browsing Make which I followed to del.icio.us which showed this link First mac on intel in the wild?. Can't see any details or links etc.., could be a fake of course, but figured someone of you here might be able to do a good analysis.

What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design?

It doesn't scale. Not from the filesystem standpoint, you can stick a couple hundred thousand files in a directory just fine with some filesystems.

But from a human mental organizational standpoint, it just doesn't scale to the number of files and amount of data that we are starting to have and use and store.

My laptop, for example, has a couple hundred thousand files on it. I have several thousand emails stored. Lots of data, in all sorts of places. Finding something is a bit of a bitch, because sometimes I can't recall if it was emailed to me or if I saw it in a document or if I heard it in an audio/video file, etc. Why should all of these be differently stored and indexed? Why can't I search all of them at once?

With a good metadata structure and indexing, the problem is solved. Everything is described by metadata in some way. Everything has been indexed into a database. I can search that database and pull up a list of matches.

When you go searching for info on the web, you search on keywords. It turns out that human beings are pretty good at picking out keywords to find content. We have to be, so much data comes our way all the time that without filtering it down to essentials, we wouldn't be able to function properly. So it's somewhat more natural to organize data like this anyway.

The problem, of course, is that metadata doesn't grow on trees. Quite a lot of it can be autogenerated, and you can write systems to index most content automatically as well. But you still need to be able to add metadata yourself. This is analogous to your idea of "I keep my files well organized".. You still would need to do that, however now you would just need to keep your files well labeled with metadata. Which makes a bit more sense to some people. Instead of defining a structure of folders, now you can define a structure of, say, keywords. You can redefine it on the fly.

If you want to view those keywords *as* folders, then you can. Nothing prevents that. Simple example is GMail. You define labels which show up on the left as links, kinda like folders full of emails. But a single email can have multiple labels and thus appear in multiple folders.

Or look at del.icio.us. You can define many keywords for each link you add, and then pull up different lists by treating them as folders: http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark would give a list of all the links that you gave the "bookmark" keyword to. http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark+games gives all the links you gave bookmark and games keywords to. How you see that organization is basically up to you, with proper design.

The idea is basically to separate the underlying organization from the view of that organization. Hierachical directory structures tie very tightly to the view of those structures. Relational database structures based on metadata do not tie to any particular view of the data at all.

What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design?

It doesn't scale. Not from the filesystem standpoint, you can stick a couple hundred thousand files in a directory just fine with some filesystems.

But from a human mental organizational standpoint, it just doesn't scale to the number of files and amount of data that we are starting to have and use and store.

My laptop, for example, has a couple hundred thousand files on it. I have several thousand emails stored. Lots of data, in all sorts of places. Finding something is a bit of a bitch, because sometimes I can't recall if it was emailed to me or if I saw it in a document or if I heard it in an audio/video file, etc. Why should all of these be differently stored and indexed? Why can't I search all of them at once?

With a good metadata structure and indexing, the problem is solved. Everything is described by metadata in some way. Everything has been indexed into a database. I can search that database and pull up a list of matches.

When you go searching for info on the web, you search on keywords. It turns out that human beings are pretty good at picking out keywords to find content. We have to be, so much data comes our way all the time that without filtering it down to essentials, we wouldn't be able to function properly. So it's somewhat more natural to organize data like this anyway.

The problem, of course, is that metadata doesn't grow on trees. Quite a lot of it can be autogenerated, and you can write systems to index most content automatically as well. But you still need to be able to add metadata yourself. This is analogous to your idea of "I keep my files well organized".. You still would need to do that, however now you would just need to keep your files well labeled with metadata. Which makes a bit more sense to some people. Instead of defining a structure of folders, now you can define a structure of, say, keywords. You can redefine it on the fly.

If you want to view those keywords *as* folders, then you can. Nothing prevents that. Simple example is GMail. You define labels which show up on the left as links, kinda like folders full of emails. But a single email can have multiple labels and thus appear in multiple folders.

Or look at del.icio.us. You can define many keywords for each link you add, and then pull up different lists by treating them as folders: http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark would give a list of all the links that you gave the "bookmark" keyword to. http://del.icio.us/yourname/bookmark+games gives all the links you gave bookmark and games keywords to. How you see that organization is basically up to you, with proper design.

The idea is basically to separate the underlying organization from the view of that organization. Hierachical directory structures tie very tightly to the view of those structures. Relational database structures based on metadata do not tie to any particular view of the data at all.

Callum Linden and I are the two developers at Linden Lab working on Mozilla embedding. Some details:

Why bother? We want to allow people running Second Life full-screen to access our web site. Right now, if you want to bid on a piece of virtual land, or read the scripting language wiki, you have to either run in a window or switch out to your browser. That sucks, so we're fixing it.

The second goal is to get to third-party web sites. I want to trade SL currency on Gaming Open Market while staying in-world. Our internal scripting language supports e-mail into and out of the world, as well as XML-RPC. Lots of people have used this to build cool web sites that tie into the virtual world. See the postcards on Snapzilla postcards and the Second Life del.icio.us tag for examples. Getting these connected into the world would be a big win.

Why Mozilla? Could there be any other choice? :-) Our competitor There.com uses Internet Explorer to do their internal web browsing, but they only support PCs. We love open source tools and use LGPL stuff extensively in both server and client. Plus, we need support for Win32, Mac and Linux.

Working with the Mozilla codebase has been interesting. It's huge, and very complex. But I'm proud to say we've found and fixed a couple bugs in Mozilla, and contributed the changes back to the Mozilla folks. I'm looking forward to Firefox 1.1 and the potential for the new Cairo/OpenGL rendering subsystem -- that may really help with embedding for 3D worlds.

So despite the linked description, Callum and I are working on getting an interactive 2D browser working first. Web pages on the surfaces of 3D objects may not ship in the next version (1.7). It'll ship as soon as it's done.

As an aside, if any of the Mozilla developers are reading this, we could use some help with embedding, specifically how to post mouse-click events into an embedded instance, please send me mail.

Cheers,

James

• World Transhumanism Association
• Singularity Institute
• KurzweilAI.net
• Extropy Institute
• Transtopia
• Better Humans

• Anders Transhuman Page - a comprehensive directory of transhumanist resources
• Transhumanism at del.icio.us

Where you will find a guide on how to embed Google Maps, a guide on How to get Slashdotted, details of the Google Translator and numerous other goodies.

del.icio.us/popular - Your source for all slashdot stories before the rush starts!

The article mentions the three axes of social bookmarks: URLs, tags, and users. A simple page of links only gives you the first of those. In addition, the various sites have additional useful features that a page of links would not provide.

One of the problems I've run into in managing even my small collection of bookmarks is finding things later. Tags help quite a lot with that. "What was that link to the monthly IBM puzzles? Well, I filed it under 'IBM'. Ah, there it is." With URLs and tags (and a decent UI for managing them), you have a workable personal bookmark organizer.

The addition of other users serves a slightly different purpose. It allows you to find new things on the web. Things like del.icio.us/popular can be used even if you're not involved in the site, but having your links there makes it easier for you to take your links, look for other people who've bookmarked similar things, and see what other things those people have bookmarked.

Finally, there are some nice things in the UI for the various bookmarking sites. Several of them will allow you to aggregate various combinations of users and tags so you can watch what's new in areas that interest you. For example, I'm interested in command line programs and knotting, among other things, so I watch everything tagged with "cli" and "knots". I also watch specific tags from a couple of people, because they've bookmarked interesting things in the past.

In del.icio.us, at least, every page is available as RSS. This allows me to do several things. For one, I subscribe to my inbox (the aggregating of tags mentioned above) in my RSS reader. I also subcribe to the bookmark lists of a couple of my friends. Furthermore, I like using Firefox's live bookmarks, which allow you to treat an RSS feed as a bookmark folder. I have several of my personal tags bookmarked in this manner both at home and at work. To add a new bookmark to both browsers at once, all I have to do is tag the link with the appropriate keyword on del.icio.us.

So if a simple page of links is all you need, great, use it. Even if your needs are more complicated in terms of personal bookmark management, if you don't need the social integration, there are bookmark management systems that you can host yourself (though I've tried a lot of them, and to my mind del.icio.us is a lot more useful even if you discount its social aspect). But if you think you could get some good out of the social linking at a place like del.icio.us, you should definitely try it out.

I guess things like backflip are coming back, but this time the services are useful. For one thing del.icio.us and Flickr have shown that embracing the developer community makes sense.
I think for most people, me included, bookmarking is easier and often provides more useful information to others than blogging, there is clearly overlap.
Services such as Wists which is somewhere between Flickr and del.icio.us are an example of a bookmarking systems that are complimentary to del.icio.us allowing people to bookmark things such as gadgets, complete with thumbnail images.
Bookmarking is lazy blogging, but if someone is good at spotting things but not so good at writing I'd much rather read what excites someone via their bookmarks than wade through their blog postings.

I guess things like backflip are coming back, but this time the services are useful. For one thing del.icio.us and Flickr have shown that embracing the developer community makes sense.
I think for most people, me included, bookmarking is easier and often provides more useful information to others than blogging, there is clearly overlap.
Services such as Wists which is somewhere between Flickr and del.icio.us are an example of a bookmarking systems that are complimentary to del.icio.us allowing people to bookmark things such as gadgets, complete with thumbnail images.
Bookmarking is lazy blogging, but if someone is good at spotting things but not so good at writing I'd much rather read what excites someone via their bookmarks than wade through their blog postings.

I guess things like backflip are coming back, but this time the services are useful. For one thing del.icio.us and Flickr have shown that embracing the developer community makes sense.
I think for most people, me included, bookmarking is easier and often provides more useful information to others than blogging, there is clearly overlap.
Services such as Wists which is somewhere between Flickr and del.icio.us are an example of a bookmarking systems that are complimentary to del.icio.us allowing people to bookmark things such as gadgets, complete with thumbnail images.
Bookmarking is lazy blogging, but if someone is good at spotting things but not so good at writing I'd much rather read what excites someone via their bookmarks than wade through their blog postings.

While I do agree there is a paradox of choice, I know that there are solutions.

Utilizing "Editors" or collectives to sift through the vast content available and mark their recommendations. Slashdot provides that for "news for nerds," which editors, other sites such as delicious popular provides community "voting" on what is interesting.

Using social networks we can subscribe to other peoples interests, and "mine" through the mountain of content.

If you have seen it, check out EPIC for one possible future.

You should use spurl.net - they have a sidebar panel (and bookmarklets) for Opera (and all other browsers) and they let me automatically add all the links to my delicious account. It's not perfect, but good enough for now, until Opera supports social bookmarking natively.

• http://del.icio.us/tag/security
• http://del.icio.us/tag/simpsons
• http://del.icio.us/tag/humor

• http://del.icio.us/tag/security
• http://del.icio.us/tag/simpsons
• http://del.icio.us/tag/humor

• http://del.icio.us/tag/security
• http://del.icio.us/tag/simpsons
• http://del.icio.us/tag/humor

• http://del.icio.us/tag/security
• http://del.icio.us/tag/simpsons
• http://del.icio.us/tag/humor

Search engines do not require html, bots are allowed to grab their RSS feeds. http://del.icio.us/robots.txt

I highly recommend anyone who hasn't yet visited this site to check it out.

A good place to look is the page of "popular" sites. Some strange and interesting stuff turns up there fairly routinely.

Stuff like how to cut (i.e. vegetables, meats etc) and Chess strategies among other sometimes bizarre sites.

http://del.icio.us/popular/

http://del.icio.us/tag/ironing has a surprising number of entries.

Greasemonkey scripts are bound by the same restrictions as any other javascript.

No, they aren't. They are inserted into the code of another site's pages, therefore they get local access priveleges over those pages.

I'm a dev on GM, and I'd like to shed some light.

First, yes, GM is in the same security sandbox as the page script. It does not run as local script.

The threat model of a user script is the very same as a bookmarklet, except that user scripts get injected without clicks, meaning that the user could forget about some installed script.

If someone installs an Evil(tm) script, it can run on pages that the evil person doesn't control, and provide data back to the evil person.

Note that such evil can be delivered in other ways (bookmarklets, toolbars, etc) which are trojans. You should consider every user script as a possible trojan. So yeah, don't install scripts that do evil things, and if you're not sure, don't install.

We're working on a community-policed user script directory which can confer some level of trust. It's not ready yet. We were slashdotted a little too early. ;) The wiki page (when it's back up) was something I put up when I first saw GM, because it clearly needed some sort of directory to get some momentum. It's now a stopgap until something more structured is completed. You might try delicious as another directory.

Also, Greasemonkey supplies some interesting functions to the user script context, including GM_xmlhttpRequest, which allows cross-domain page requests. Couple this with GM_setValue and GM_getValue, and a user script can indeed very effectively share data between different web apps. Before you wail in terror, note that information could be sent to evil third-party domain already by using scripted image tags, iframes, and form posts. GM only opens up an easier way to share data; it does not allow anything that's truly new in this respect.

Interestingly enough, as part of the BBC's new service, they've provided a tagging system (associated with delicious).

For example, the tags for Malcolm Glazer's takeover of Manchester United football club are currently given as:
"utd wanker wanker asshat asshat utd beard"

It's actually a great idea, but perhaps a little more tweaking may be in order.

Simpy.com is a cool idea and looks good, but isn't sharing of tagged bookmarks what del.icio.us already does? whois simpy.com shows that it's your project. :)

I've been collecting links which can be viewed at del.icio.us under the "realid" tag

Feel free to make your own del.icio.us account and add to the collection.

Sounds suspiciously like Wikipedia to me.

or like del.icio.us or any other tag based link manager.

Yup, I've made good use of tagging in both iTunes and iPhoto. Pity it hasn't been so easy to tag my other files. I've also just adopted tagging for bookmarks too. It makes an amazing difference to your ability to find old bookmarks. The crucial thing is being able to use multiple tags for each item. Far better than the extremely limited system of organizing things in folders. It's astonishing how long it has taken people to figure out these simple things.

(Of course, Paul Graham retracted this claim when BusinessWeek informed him today the article was sponteneous, uninfluenced by a PR firm; but I'm sure BusinessWeek had his article foremost in their thoughts when they announced their new blogging site.)

Here are some google sightseeing sites- mine first, of course!

perljam.net/notes/interesting-google-satellite-map s/

http://www.paulrademacher.com/housing/
www.shreddies.org/gmaps/
cryptome.org/usndc-eyeball.htm
del.icio.us/knodi/google_maps
www.returnofdesign.com/feature.php?article=12
gmaps.nicj.net/

-ted

Have you tried del.icio.us ("social bookmarks")? I haven't used it, but it might be worth a try. You add bookmarks by selecting a bookmarklet, and view them by visiting a webpage. Not the most integrated, but it's here now and might do the trick at least until real syncronization is available.
Another (too difficult) approach would be to have your Mozilla preferences/bookmarks on an NFS , SMB or other network-mounted partition.

The news has recently been announced -- just in time for the emergence of AI-ready robots -- that the sideways integration of sensory input with a conceptual mindgrid is the solution to artificial intelligence.

The solution to AI qua problem -- qua grand challenge to humanity -- exists at first in theory only.

The Association for Computing Machinery has reported in ACM Sigplan Notices 33(12):25-31 (1998) and in ACM Sigplan Notices 39(12):11-16 (2004) on progress in implementing the AI solution as open-source AI software evolving into Mind.Forth for robots. There is an implicit contest involved here of who can keep the date-stamped robot AI Mind running the longest, as if for the Guiness Book of World Records. Since Mentifex AI is in the public domain, programmers are free to customize special AI Minds in any programming language and to offer their artificial intelligence for sale on eBay in the Computers and Networking software marketplace.

Please do not point to the primitive Mentifex software as proof that the claim of an AI solution is false. The only claim made here is that AI has been solved in theory, not yet (please stand by) successfully implemented in software or hardware. The Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (AGIRI) is creating powerful Novamente software but is handicapped for lack of funding and for disregard of the Mentifex AI theory. Mentifex has a secret plan to locate funding for AGIRI if the AGI team either hires Mentifex or agrees to implement the Theory of Cognitivity.

SkramKoob has a cute cross-platform bookmark service that makes it fairly easy to keep your bookmarks (skramkoob reversed) in a place where you can access it from any machine. They don't do the social networking thing like the de.lirio.us and del.icio.us do, but they are very convenient and cross platform and don't make you view some huge full-sized web page to get at your links.

Too bad Pirated Sites is down.

Basically, what Steve Mallet did, creator of Del.irio.us, is take the design, the idea, and most of the features of delicious, and copy and paste them with a special "open-source" CTRL-V buttons (he's since changed the site layout and design it would seem - to none at all)

Not unsurprisingly, there has been a flurry of discussion about del.icio.us on the del.icio.us listserv. Most of it is fairly constructive and thoughtful. I think what bothers me the most isn't that yet another social bookmarking engine is springing up. Furl and Spurl have been around for a while and there are few minor ones. But each of these generally adds something new to the mix, such as private bookmarks, or longer comments, or better integration with the browser. Del.irio.us doesn't add anything new at all.

Except maybe open-source. Yay.

It reminds me of the goold ole days, when one friend who wanted to run a BBS copied all the files and ANSI from another friend who had been running a BBS for years. Morale of the story? The second, copied, BBS sucked and died because the "creator" didn't have any innovation or creativity in him anyway. That's my call on delirious.

Some people use del.icio.us as a social service, but I think they're in the minority. Most people I talk to (myself included) use del.icio.us as a way to organize and sync bookmarks between multiple machines.

And now as I use the service more with FireFox's "Live Bookmarks" feature, I use it to make a "hotlist" of new stuff for given topics. You can keep an eye on certain tags, watching for new links. I can, for example, keep an ear to the ground for ruby links with a live bookmark pointed at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/ruby/ .

To go even further on researching a subject, I can find a link I liked and check the relevantly tagged entries of other people who made that link. Maybe they found something I missed.

I was skeptical of del.icio.us, and I was a pretty late adopter, but I'm a believer now. It's a very cool service.

You're misunderstanding the argument. An analogy would be starting your own separate internet. Why do this when everyone is already here? Similarly, people benefit from the many already existing users at del.icio.us, who provide a sort of emergent value in the system.

Showing the tens of thousands of existing tags would probably crash your browser. However, the site that this is a clone of, del.icio.us, shows the most popular tags here. You can view what others have bookmarked under a tag, for example, art, like so. And you can search your own bookmarks here. (Searching everyone's bookmarks is disabled temporarily until new hardware gets installed)

Showing the tens of thousands of existing tags would probably crash your browser. However, the site that this is a clone of, del.icio.us, shows the most popular tags here. You can view what others have bookmarked under a tag, for example, art, like so. And you can search your own bookmarks here. (Searching everyone's bookmarks is disabled temporarily until new hardware gets installed)

Showing the tens of thousands of existing tags would probably crash your browser. However, the site that this is a clone of, del.icio.us, shows the most popular tags here. You can view what others have bookmarked under a tag, for example, art, like so. And you can search your own bookmarks here. (Searching everyone's bookmarks is disabled temporarily until new hardware gets installed)

So this guy took code someone else wrote (Rubric), and set it up on a domain confusingly similar to del.icio.us? Why, just to be a dick? Should I set up goolge, the open sourced competitor to google?

... calm down, this isn't quite the heresy the subject line indicates it to be ;-).

Having an open-source implementation of social bookmarking similar to del.icio.us is nifty, and kudos to the author for writing it. But what does the user actually gain by switching? Del.icio.us already has a web-service API (complete with Python wrapper) and RSS feeds of its data. The above link shows that the development process is already pretty open -- follow it and the links from there to see what people have done with del.icio.us.

Users of the new service will not be able to take advantage of the network effect that del.icio.us already has going for it; given that we're talking about social sites, this is significant. So, to summarize, yay source code, but what is the benefit here?

Joshua Schachter had some great news today, quitting his day job and now committed full time to del.icio.us, with the help of some outside investment.

Interesting conversation on the del.icio.us list, give you an idea from both sides.

Hmmm. The de.lirio.us website is almost identical to the del.icio.us website. I know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all, but you'll probably want to change your site design...

Is it just me or are the Live Bookmarks for Slashdot and http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/ getting very similar?

Ugh, I did those links wrong and forgot to preview.

Sorry. Popular sites that use tags are http://flickr.com/ and http://del.icio.us/

Along these lines, I bet the horribly named del.icio.us is next. It's a a kind of like Flikr for bookmarks, which could actually be a lot more useful than something for photos.

http://del.icio.us/

Torrent here

via del.icio.us/tag/bittorrent

I suggest you try your hand at "Wooden Ships & Iron Men" an old Avalon Hill title. They don't make the game anymore, you'll have to fight on eBay for one of the few complete copies of it. I'm in the middle of revising the rule book and adding a computer simulation addendum. I'm also updating and re-releasing the 'ships (6)' command line version of the game. My bookmarks related to wsim are on del.icio.us.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

I used to use Yahoo Bookmarks, but then I discovered del.icio.us.

But I still use the unofficial Yahoo Toolbar for FF- it's configurable, and I use enough Yahoo services (though typically not search) that it's worth having.

IMHO, Yahoo services (address book, etc.) tend not to be the best available, but are generally good enough and pretty convenient.