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."

Comments

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml [networksolutions.com] [networksolutions.com]). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php [clara.net]) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each mont

Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot

[mOoZik]

Newsflash: that's how all newspaper sites make their money! They mostly copy the content from original sites, add in a few pieces of opinion, and make money on subscriptions, but usually just advertisement. Hell, that's what Slashdot does, too! How do you think Slashdot makes money? And it is my belief that they make tens of thousands. But that's not the point: the point is that Slashdot does it, Roland does it, everyone else does it: that's how it is. Stop bitching.

Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot

[slungsolow]

Newspapers actually pay for services like the AP or UPI or Reuters.

Roland makes money by copy and pasting articles and then writing a few sentences about them. I have nothing against his blog. I do have something against him profiting from it.

everybody loves Roland - OTT moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

So, this gets a +5 and then drops like a stone to a two - OK, it's a repeat, but still bears examination. Then Roland, the troll, replies himself.

Now, there are a lot of insightful replies - all of which dropped like a stone from 3/4/5 insightful to 0/1 insightful in the space of two minutes.

In my mind this leaves two options:

1. Lots of people love Roland, but they are shy, and only moderate and don't post
2. Roland is sleeping with Hemos

Y'know, I used to respect the anarchy of Slashdot. Now, I don't think there's any way we can trust the objectivity of the editors a bit.

Or am I really the only one here who think's Roland is a plagiarizing c*nt?

cLive ;-)

Off-line alternative?

[MasTRE]

I'm looking for a stand-alone alternative. del.icio.us is great, but when the site goes down (as it did when this was posted), you are f-d. What's a good alternative that will do something akin to it? Something that requires a database/server install is fine (and actually preferred, as it's accessible over the net) - the main requirement is that there be some way to back up my data and, in case the server crashes/burns, I can set up a new serv[er|ice] and simply reload my backup. Which I can't do with del.icio.us. I like knowing my data is safe on a DVD-R somewhere.

I am loathe to use the service because I forsee investing a lot of time and energy in organizing my huge collection of personal bookmarks and I do not wish to risk wasting it in case del.icio.us goes offline (as it certainly will in 1 [week|month|year|decade|century]).

Ideally, the software would also create a local copy of the page(s) bookmarked, as all pages certainly will go offline (see above).

Re:del.icio.us In A Nutshell

[patro]

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.

Anyone tried Spurl or Furl? They seem very similar to del.icio.us. Any recommendations about which one to use?