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
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
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?
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
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 ;-)
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.