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DURL, a Search Tool for del.icio.us
Roland Piquepaille writes "I've been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us since it started (check here for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL, written by Robin Millette, lets you type an URL and see if some other people already "delicious'ed it." And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for 'popularity contests.' But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn't have thought of, they don't compare to del.icio.us. This overview contains more comments, examples and screenshots."
The delicious firefox plugin from http://delicious.mozdev.org/ is a little better than this because you can right click on a page and see who else has bookmarked without going to the page. It also gives tons of other nice feature, such as caching of you del.icio.us bookmarks for a sidebar. It's really nice.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
So you sign up at del.icio.us (a rather akward domain name) and you make yourself a user name. After you've signed up, you get a special web link you can put on the bookmark toolbar of your browser.
Then later, whenever you then find a page on the 'net you like and want to "bookmark", instead of using your browser to bookmark it, you click on your link to delicious and a window pops up where you can type in a few "tags" that you think describe the page you're visiting.
What makes delicious so cool is that you don't need to make a complex hierarchy to organize your links: Instead, the program lets you slice 'em and dice 'em based on the tags: Just go to "del.icio.us/userid" and you can browse all your bookmarks.
Like Wikis, delicious is so powerful because it is so incredibly simple: For instance, typing "del.icio.us/tag/waffles" gives you a list of all sites everyone on delicious has bookmarked about waffles. This simplicity also makes it easy for others to create extensions for firefox (foxylicious) and such.
Also cool is that if you find other people who create good bookmarks you can set up to be notified when they post new stuff.
From my expereince, delicious is by far the fastest website dispersing mechanism that exists: Before the big blogs have the latest coolest links, delicious users will already know about it way beforehand, because of the excellent way it can be used to track niche interests on the web.
I've been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us since it started (check here for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL , written by Robin Millette , lets you type an URL and see if some other people already "delicious'ed it." And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for 'popularity contests.' But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn't have thought of, they don't compare to del.icio.us. Read more for lots of examples...
As I'm not sure if I convinced you, let's start with a real blog, Smart Mobs .
If I feed the URL http://www.smartmobs.com/ to Bloglines by submitting the search string "http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www .smartmobs.com/&submit=Search,"
I receive 3358 unsorted results.
If I do the same with Technorati , I find 1,614 links from 1,234 sources, sorted by date.
In both cases, this produces a number of references which is hard to browse. Why a particular site has quoted Smart Mobs? It's not obvious to find an answer.
So, it's time to use DURL, which returns a more manageable number of 45 results from del.icio.us.
http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_1.jpg
Here is a screen capture of the page returned by DURL. You can see that some people are reading Smart Mobs because they associated it with the concepts of "creativity" or "ubiquitous computing". Others are using tags such as "collaboration," "mobile" or "community." (Credit: Robin Millette/del.icio.us).
Let's check for example the tag "Social Software."
http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_2.jpg
It brings us to del.icio.us/hbryant/social_software . (Credit: del.icio.us). Wow! Exciting! New tools for del.icio.us! Let's visit Soooo del.icio.us people can't stand it! .
In a summary, with only two clicks, I found a gold mine. Do you know another service which is that efficient?
Now, let's return to the previous page and check the link to the "community" tag.
http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_3.jpg
This time, this leads us to del.icio.us/oubiwann/community . (Credit: del.icio.us). From there, I can now read a "definition of Mundialization" or discover what is the "World Government of World Citizens."
The more I use del.icio.us, the more I like it. This doesn't mean I'm not using Bloglines or Technorati, but I'm using them for 'exhaustivity,' not for 'discovery.'
[And here is an additional note for Robin Millette, the author of DURL. In fact, you can do the same search on del.icio.us by adding the string "http://del.icio.us/url?url=" (without the quotes) before the URL you want to see if it has been delicioused. But it might be too geeky for some of you.]
Source: Robin Millette, December 20, 2004; and various websites
I think you mean StumbleUpon
As an alternative to deli.cio.us spurl is a good service for online bookmarking.
Actually I found spurl's interface best of its kind, and it has really nice browser workarounds to get you ready to spurl easy and fast. Even a spurl firefox extension is out. Spurl has a plugin for IE as well.
I wonder why the slashdot editors allowed this one to be published in the first place. I am sure any geek on slashdot worth his salt can just easily use this for the same thing:
http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://www.myurl.com/
it would be trivial to create a javascript bookmarklet to do just that.
And judging by the accepted submissions, it's in fact rpiquepa, not Roland Piquepaille. And they both have freaks.
Roland Piquepaille (780675) is a troll. rpiquepa (644694) is the real Roland Piquepaille. Just look at which one has accepted stories. Whether you like him or not, don't attribute the parent's idiocy to him.
English is easier said than done.
Bah. Idiot mods. They usually have no sense of humor, no insight, and well... no sense at all. However, I will say this. I've noticed that if someone says something that may annoy one of the Slashdork crew, you tend to get a ton of "Offtopic" or "Overrated" mods. I wish I could meet one of the mods in person just once. Just once... ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o