Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Not another Roland article spamming his stupid site for advertising dollars!
Nothing says "thanks for providing a great service" like a good post-holiday slashdotting. Note: the burning smell coming from the server room isn't fudge cooking.
Oh and I noticed they have a "most active" list of links, but no porn section???
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
This sounds a little bit like the firefox extension Wikalong. With this extension installed you can make comments about a particular website and read what other people have written. Its kind of like meta data for web pages.
I thought it was a way for me to quickly compare all the mortgage offers I get in my email....
Monstar L
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...
Were has all the pr0n gone?
sla.shdo.tted
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.
Dear Sirs at del.icio.us,
You should try hostname v. It'll give you the version of the hostname utility. No really, you should try it!
Regards,
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I searched for http://slashdot.org on http://tools.waglo.com/durl
The result showed hundreds of entries for slashdot with different descriptions.
At the bottom the last entry description was like this: Community weblog - for coders and geeks. Has interesting reputation management system - "Karma". Despite crap in discussions very frequently points to interesting links.
I don't know why we have such image in other people's minds.
On the site 2004weblogawards.com, though slashdot was discussed for the weblog awards, we didn't made it.
Check the following URL and see what they are talking about: http://2004weblogawards.com/archives/000071.php
Check for the following comment: I would recommend Slashdot if they weren't so UNIX slanted, and full of idiots.
I think we (at SlashDot) should enhance our image infront of the world.
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
My other multimillion dollar idea is:
ascendtopresident
Everyone is rated on their forum postings on news articles like hot or not.
Everyone can click their own personal bias: such as rep/dem, con/lib, prolife/prochoice. And the highest ranking of them will ascend to the top, so you can read the top people's comments on news articles. Being on the top will encourage people to spend more time on their responses too.
God spoke to me.
No mods (with a sense of humour) seem to have got it yet.
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 like delicious so I made my own version that is multi-lingual here:
http://historyagent.com/
Has firefox extensions, and HTML segment (images/formatting etc) commenting via selection. You just select a portion of the page, including images, to use as the comment and hit the bookmarklet and it is added.
Also I wanted more feeds possible, for examples see: http://feeds.historyagent.com/joeldg/
Anyway, just wanted to point out that del is no the only alternative out there.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
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.
I was waiting for a tool like delicious to come around, I float around to many computers at different locations, and I wanted my bookmarks online. I was trying a php bookmark app that was damned difficult to use hosted on my own server when I discovered delicious. It ingenious I think, but what good is it if it's not available? I often get the 403 service not available in the popup (using the firefox extension) and often can't access my bookmark page. I've been using Furl at times like this. What is a geek to do, I've subscribed to the del.icio.us mailing list, to figure out what's going on with the development, but I wonder if it will ever be stable. Whine whine, I know, but has anyone else thought about a distributed del.icio.us?
Searching for http://www.primidi.com gave 21 results, with only a couple of comments. I thought every slashdotter who used del.icio.us would have commented on this site by now.
Mod parent up!
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:
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 ;-)
If you are an editor (or publisher) you have to pay other people (or news agencies etc.) for the content they deliver.
I disagree that payment for content is a defining characteristic of editing.
Pick up a copy of the latest Writer's Market. There are *tons* of *print* publications that publish and edit (and sell) content submitted by writers that don't get paid -- voluntarily.
I don't want to be defending the guy -- he may be a sleazebag for all I know. If it's plaigarism or even unauthorized (but credited) reproduction, then yeah, it's a legal issue. But if he's "adding value" and the parent post suggests he is, then he's adding value. I didn't RTFA, so I don't know.
It seems some people think he's cheating. Maybe he is. I don't know. But the parent post describes 'editing', and evidently thinks he's a bad editor and is overpaid. That may be the case.
The slashdot connection is interesting, however.
Software Wars
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).
Must-not-watch TV!
Editors/Slashdot managers,
in the interest of keeping the discussion on Roland's stories civil, I'd like to make a Slashdot enhancement request: Could you please create a category for Roland's stories, which interested users could remove from the front page (like many people did with the Jon Katz years ago)?
If people could remove his stories, many of the whining about his stories would vanish, since they'd have a way to avoid him.
sla.sh.dot.us
Similar concept, but not quite the same. I think del.icio.us is going to go exactly the same thing plus more soon though, since it's in more active development.
Oh, and mods? Offtopic? Come on!
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I was wondering where the "hoagieslapper" nickname came from!
Sean
I haven't used del.icio.us myself - can anyone tell me if it's prone to being spammed or not? If not, what do they do to prevent it from being overrun by link whores and the like? (it's sad that we even have to think about that, but the brutal reality seems to be if anything can be ruined in the name of a making money, it will be)
Simpy[1] is a service like Delicious (but with a superior full-text search). It offers something very much like DURL, but it also shows you the popularity of a given link over time, as a chart![2]. If you don't have a Simpy account, you can try the demo account[3].
[1] Simpy
[2] Link History bookmarklet
[3] demo/demo
Simpy
I do not understand why the tool should get a big fuss, it is already available with foxy.licio.us and the coding of this tool does not need much brains or skill(It is in del.icio.us's API). The author also does not give us any source code so it is obviously not GPL. Anyways I have coded two scripts that do exactly what this tool does using the del.icio.us API, and it only required about 7 minutes of research on the web. Here they are they do not do rss fead but you could make it do it just search of an rssgen, comments as apreciated.
#___________First Method_______________
#!/usr/bin/env python
#PyURL1.py
import md5
from urllib import urlopen
from sys import popen
site = raw_input("Enter the site's address")
if site[:7] != 'http://': site = 'http://' + site
hash = md5.new(site)
popen('/usr/bin/firefox %s' % ('http://del.icio.us/url/' + hash.hexdigest( )))
#___________Second Method_______________
#!/usr/bin/env python
#PyURL2.py
from urllib import urlopen
from sys import popen
site = raw_input("Enter the site's address")
if site[:7] != 'http://': site = 'http://' + site
popen('/usr/bin/firefox %s' % ('http://del.icio.us/url?url=' + site))
QoDS ec
So I just made myself an account, added GMAIL as a bookmark, and then decided to see which other users did the same. In fact, there were 331 others, all identified by their Deli's usernames, and practically all of them linking to gmail's login page. Ditto for the 126 with links to My Yahoo!. Etc' Etc'.
Best to have a Deli' account that is different from the one used for email services... I can easily see Spam mail originating from these sorts of lookups.
It amazes me to see such simple stuff celebrated and drawing so much attention. I find the DURL output quite hard to read. On the other hand, Simpy[1] is a service like Delicious (but with a superior full-text search, full Boolean support and so on) and it offers something very much like DURL. However, unlike DURL, it also shows you the popularity of a given link over time, as a chart![2]. This makes is _much_ easier to visualize things.
If you don't have a Simpy account, you can try the demo account[3].
[1] Simpy
[2] Link History bookmarklet
[3] demo/demo
Example: link history for Slashdot: chart.
Simpy
However, the Speculative Search Game allows you to make predictions about any web page -- not just blogs. Moreover, The Speculative Search Game has a much simpler model than BlogShares and most other artificial game markets -- and perhaps this would encourage more people to play.
The Speculative Search Engine is not available yet, but will be if/when the game attracts many players and generates some interesting data.
Doesn't del.icio.us do what furl does, but without saving content? Does anyone know both these services?
A similar service called Hyperlinkomatic is available. I have been using it for a while and although it hasn't been updated since the summer, it has been very useful for me, and whenever my friends are bored, I can send them to my personal page chocked full of url goodness.
Similar...and there's a RSS feed.
Furl.net
I run a small internet community called MemeStreams that has had a feature like this for some time. MemeStreams has a thread bookmarklet. You can click on it when viewing any URL and see a discussion thread about that page if users of MemeStreams have commented on it. These discussions could clearly be moderated although there is not enough traffic to warrant it right now.
The idea is that any web page could be associated with a open, threaded discussion that is available one click away.
How do you know Slashdot accepts every Piquepaille submission? His Slashdot "homepage" lists only those accepted, not those rejected (or pending); unprivileged Slashdot users can't see the rejections. Unless it's you, CowboyNeal ! Posting as AC in a deliriously crafty unredisinformation campaign to dispel any criticism of your fat Piquepaille/Slashdot nexus, which might threaten your $129.40:mo (20% of Piquepaille's $647) kickback! With over 800K registered users (and counteless other ACs), that's at least $0.00016175 per Slashdotter you're skimming off the top, every month! All just because you bend other Slashdotters' work, nerdy story submissions and carefully distorted English summaries, into the Slashdot we know and hate to love to hate.
Now the truth can finally be told: this whole subthread is really an ad for BlogAds. For totality in reflexive, postmodern Slashdot journalistic disintegrity, I note that I am Roland Piquepaille, and I rejected this message.
--
make install -not war