cc licensed flickr photo shared by atxryan

It’s been almost a month since the sky fell on delicious.com. In news that spread at retweet speed, a leaked screenshot from a Yahoo inside briefing had listed the social bookmarking site delicious as being in the chopping block. Or is it chopped?

And so ensued the frenzy.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jcolman

A literal export rush ensued as people aimed to export their tagged history, many of them rushing to dump them into diigo. This included me. I am guilt of frenzy feeding. Or at least nibbling.

The sky had certainly fallen, and the clucking ensued. What will we do! Hurry! Export! Import! Sign up! My tags! My Tags!

And then this was followed by the glut of posts about “alternative social bookmarking services.” Alec Couros, in the method he does well, convened a massive google doc editing process to produce a list of suggestions (man does he have rabid followers) .

I found most of the frenzy to be missing, the most key point to delicious. That there are two realms of consideration. If your use of delicious was purely individual, and you sought out an alternative, many of the suggestions would do well, from pinboard to Mr Magoo. There are scads of them. Heck, you might was well go back to using your browser ones.

But that is the bottom rung of the bag of gold that is delicious. At least to me.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by luc legay

You cannot take your network, and its sharing effects with you. Yes, for myself, I rely on searching delcious as a primary research tool to track web sites. But my larger interest is in the collaborative features of tagging (by conference, class, project), by re-publishing that on web sites, by the sharing of links via for: tags and email. I relied on my network of fellow taggers as yet another stream of golden information. Should I just bail at the first clucking of storm clouds?

You cannot take that with you to pinboard. Even diigo, which, I would agree with has some compelling features in its groups and annotations, and has many great educator groups, yet it feels about 9 times as heavy as delicious. There is some of a network effect there, but it must be orders of magnitude less than delicious.

I find the neglecting of recognizing the network effects and focusing on just “Alternative tools” to be short sighted, and the mad rush was premature.

Yes, I accept that services will come and go. Before I used delicious, I was a relatively early user of furl (who else furled first?), which was purchased (ultimately by diigo, woah- my link goes there http://furl.net/user/cogdog).

But long before, I was doing home grown link sharing/organizing in a home grown system I built at Maricopa, the Bag of URLs (that one is mostly gone, the link is a bit from the Internet Archive, but it is missing the lovely graphic of a URL coming out of a shopping bag). It was strung together with HTML and perl, and set up so I could take submissions and publish new “issues” on a periodic basis. I ammassed thousands of annotated links, and even made it searchable with some long forgotten unix indexing software (glimpse? gais?)

I know tools will come and go.

But you do not get that network effect as easily.

In fact, I am not sure any current or future social bookmarking tool can ever gain the network power of the delicious one.

Not being a business person, I may stand on shaky ground, but Yahoo, which is looking more and more like smug brontosaurs sauntering around and 10 minutes before the end of the Jurassic era, has provide a textbook case of how to f*** up an internet bag of gold. Piss it away. Not tend to it.

First of all, for all the time they had and developed delicious, they did not appear to do one thing to build anything that leveraged the delicious network. Maybe they did some analysis of activity, but as a business, they did not appear to do one thing to create something that made or led them to money. Everything google does ties into feeding their revenue stream, be it ads or improving their search engoine (perhaps this is what Yahoo was doing, but thats a battle they can barely claim a bronze medal for).

Second, where was their company message after the rumor erupted? Where is the Yahoo stance on the issue? There are flaffing about embarrassment over a secret revealed. There is one moldy blog post on delicious (the most recent and it is over a month old) offering luke warm re-assurance and a BUY ME please prayer. It was not an optimistic sign.

Contrast this to say the proactive stance Skype did after their week long outage in December. Their CEO was out in front, they took responsibility, and offered information ot their users (and woot! $1 of credit).

It is not even clear today what Yahoo’s corporate message is on delicious. It is the sound of a link dying in space. To me, they look like blundering fools. Yahoos. Bufoons. Poop heads.

So whats to become of this? Well, I have not altered my delicious activity one bit. For something that the sky fell on, it works fine. It’s not like they will just shut the lights out without notice Mag.nolia style. There will always be time to move when the bottom falls out.

I have faith that either everyone who fell asleep at the leadership desk at Yahoo will wake up, or a real player will step in. I am hoping amm msy stuff, all my shared tags, all my web sites that ride on them, will still work.

Yeah. I may eat crow one day, but its better than running around like a diarrhetic chicken.

The internet makes it even more easy to fall in a line and march into the sea.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ric e Ette

PS In my haste to click publish, I forgot to add the next logical wave of panic/worry- see Doc Searls on What if flickr fails? again, I am more worried about the loss of the flickr network/community if it “fails” or if there are moves to self-hosted flickr-like sites.

There are several tools you can use to have your blogs, when they publish posts, to automatically send a tweet out with the link. On this WordPress blog (and several NMC ones) I use the Twitter Tools Plugin. On some other sites I use twitterfeed which does the same thing, but from any RSS feed you want (so I have some drupal feeds that are auto tweeted this way).

But what if you wanted some way to “tag” or track such content? Well, with the more recent version of Twitter Tools (and as a feature on twitter feed) you can edit your own lead in text to published tweets… so mine come out as “CogDogBlogged:” and then the tweet:

Previously, you had to edit this bit of text in the Twitter Tools plugin, but fortunately they made it now an editable option– this is just a small way to “personalize” your message so it does not look like everyone other’s use of the same tool.

So I speculated, what might happen if you included a hash tag, such as say, by blog about Joys of Peanut Butter, so my posts could be aggregated with all of the other PBJ bloggers out there- I can just add a hash tag to this text:

And then you could use an RSS feed of the twitter search on this tag to display the current results.

I was thinking of trying this on say my running blog, so it would be a way via a twitter search I could collect all my tweets that came from this blog… but I could not think why I would use that.

But I am thinking that maybe, perhaps, projects like Jim Groom is doing where multiple blogs are posting, that if his twitter plugin for WPMU can allow individual blog owners to edit this same prefix tag to tweeted posts, they could be aggregated from multiple student blogs and even mixed in, with say, student tweets from other sources, all collected around a class tag.

It’s half an idea (or less)- maybe someone can complete me ;-)

I’ve written previously (not that I remembered, I had to use my own blog search) on the challenge of tag juggling when one’s tagging habits have sprawled so much one wonders how many can they keep in the air.

And its been something we’ve been discussing for the tagging we ask people to do for the Horizon Project… can they remember the tag? Will they remember the tag? Will they tag?

My delicious tags are messy, and rather than clean them up, I just keep sweeping them under the rug, and nudging the door so maybe the guests wont notice my lack of tidy tag keeping.

Bu I just lapsed into the more severe case I now coin- Tagnesia- the loss of memory of a tag you have used in the past.

I had come across this great flickr set of Academic Evolution images that Gideon Burton makes for his blog of the same name. They are quite useful for future presentations/blog posts, and I knew I had tagged a few before in delicious… and…. I.. could… not… remember…. my….. own tag.

Blackness.

I got dizzy.

Short of breath.

I tried browsing the list but it was so long.

I tried guessing but failed.

So I thought I could backdoor and find one site I had already tagged,

it was called…. ummmm…. what was it?

Yes! It was buy a woman who’s flickr name began with an ?? “L”? or was it “P”?

Not good.

But I did remember that she had published her collection as a book on Lulu and I had bought the book! It was in my living room on the shelf… no on the coffee table… no it WAS on the shelf.

That’s it! It is called “Interesting Snippets”

Now I have to Google to find it.

And there it is!

So now, I know I have a secret trick. Oh if I can only remember what it was?

I do remember,

If I tag this site again, the delicious firefox extension will pull up my previous tagged entry! It does, and now I see the tag I was looking for!

It is my own tag 4presos http://delicious.com/cogdog/4presos I found my forgotten tag.

Maybe there is Joy in Tagville, tonight.

But wait.

No!

Nooooooooooooooooooooo.

The new site I was ready to tag?

I HAD TAGGED IT BACK IN MARCH!

I have Tagnesia.

I have this running on a page at http://cogdogblog.com/tag-poetry/. Now I am inspired to do more tagging of my posts, cause this is fun.

photo credit: Steve Roe

So its with some irony I saw some tagging “instructions” for a flickr group. I’ll likely lose my membership for posting this, but small beans. I liked the concept of this Project NetPop group — to “depict how the internet is changing life around you… Post pictures to show the impact of the Internet and technology on your life and the world around you.” In fact I was noodling about a blog post asking folks to share their stories of Good Things that have happened solely through the connected nature of this web thing.

I was invited to drop photos in this group but was floored at the tagging instructions:

Tagging is important! Here’s what we ask:

1. NETPOP: You agree to assign the tag “Netpop” to all the photos you add to this group.

2. LOCATION: You agree to tag all the photos you add to this group with the location where it was taken (if appropriate):

a. City
b. State
c. Country

3. CATEGORIES: You also agree to use any of the other tags, if applicable, listed in the library that is covered in the “USE THESE TAGS…” discussion.

4. SEGMENT: If you take the survey at ProjectNetpop.com and find out which segment you belong to, add the segment name to your tags.

Have fun!

Moderators agree to review tags and categorize pictures according to the Project Netpop tag rules.

Have fun? As if I am free form tagging I am going to remember all of this? Do I have to tag my mood, the room temperature, my cartesian coordinates, what I ate for lunch?

Top down tagging seems to me a pipe dream; consider your self lucky if you can get a group to remember to use one tag.

But then again, what do I know?

On my fleet of NMC WordPress site I am shifting to using tags more on posts as an organizer, and tossing some clouds on the pages (see lower right sidebar of Pachyderm Services). Its a bit easier on these sites that have a relatively low number of posts to go and “back tag” content.

But here at the old Yeller CogDogBlog, there are a lot of old bones- this, when published will be number 2100. And my tagging in the past, has been, well spotty. On the other hand, I was never too rigorous with the categorizing, so I am thinking as far as being effective, the approaches may be tied for last place over here.

Never the less, I am more of a loose ranging tagger than a cubby-hole categorizer, so I have started tagging posts, and swapped out the old Category listing on the side bar to a tag cloud (I use the option to randomize the order, mmm love randomness), my template code is:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=10&largest=24&number=40&order=RAND'); ?>

And I tweaked the Archives template in a few places to do a proper header and title. I have my templates tuned to display the links to the tag archives when used, as well as the WP Tags to Technorati plugin which links the same tags to who knows what at Technorati (see the bottom of this post, if I remember to tag it!)

To enable the switch, I used the built -n WordPress tools to convert my old categories to tags (under Manage -> Import), so for now, the cloud is likely heavily weighted my the old categories.

How do they stack up? Putting them side by side, we have, weighing in at about 140 different ones, are my sloppy pile of “Dog Tags” versus the neatly stacked 32 different CatDog-egories:

There is no real answer as to which is “best” (although my headers show my bias) – it’s like asking for a definitive answer to the world’s favorite vegetable (though, I am sure it is not beets. Nope. Nasty. Yeccch). I like tags, but pretty much, in WordPress you can make categories work like tags (multiple associations), so it more boils down to your preferences.

I’m a tagger, what are you?

Read/Write Web: “Bring out your dead!”

Tag Clouds: “I’m not quite dead yet….”

Titled “Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools”, the content provided hits the ground on all good points:

* Excellent collection of resources on social netowrking tools etc, your smorgasboard of small pieces loosely joined
* The way presented is so appropriate- posted on a part of free hosted wikispaces site (I first learned about wikispaces from Leigh’s blog, and have put it to some use over the last year). Stack this up next to some bloated multimegabyte static PowerPoint full of word slides and see which is more useful and meaningful in the long haul
* The wikified presentation makes good, clean use of Creative Commons licensed flickr images. Makes it look appealing as opposed to a drab text wiki (looks count for something, eh?)
* All content is blatantly CreativeCommons-ed

Sections range from Read/Write Web, to RSS, to Social Software, to Tagging, to Creative Commons, to “Rip Mix Feed” to the Future Virtual Learning Environment.

If you are into new collaboration tools, etc, this one is a keeper!

RawSugar enables you to save and tag all your favorite web pages and then later find the one need in seconds. Why is this so important? Think of how many times you forgot the name of a restaurant, place or event you’re trying to remember and can’t locate the right web page with the information you need.

Saving pages on the web with RawSugar means you can find them in seconds just by remembering a couple of key words. Perhaps your looking for a cafe in San Francisco. Just search for San Francisco cafes and RawSugar displays all the web pages tagged San Francisco and cafes. Looking through the list you’ll find the ones you’ve saved. With RawSugar you can easily save everything worth saving: travel destinations, hobby sites, kid’s birthday places, physicians, architects, piano teachers, favorite recipes, professional and business-related resources… you name it!

Actually it looks at quick glance to be as featured as any other one. It has nice way of suggesting tags (some AJAX tag completion is mixed in the sugar?). My mini gripe is the JavaScript bookmarklet tool does not have a way of grabbing the highlighted text in the targeted web page as a default content for its “Notes” field (the site description). This necessitates the window swapping task of cutting and pasting a description from the original site. It takes almost no extra programming weight to provide this feature. I have hacked some other ones by combing through the source page of the add site form, but Raw Sugar had so much JavaScript and other obfuscated code I could not even begin to dabble.

I quickly made an account (I only have 14 of these things), and was able to export my del.icio.us bookmarks as XML and import them into the RawSugar jar… well, it got most of them. It’s a big pile, and there was some obscure proxy error message.

But that does give me good pause to think about what a Good Thing it is that data can be this transportable… I’ve shlepped stuff from furl to del.icio.us from linked my spurl to del.icio.us… shouldn’t more data be as movable? So now I have added RawSugar to my hefty Site Submission Bookmarklet Maker.

So a thumbs up on RawSuga, though I doubt I will do much marking in it now. My only complaint is as being a diabetic of having an aversion to the name– but then again, I doubt one would get far with a site based on “Aspartame” or “Sucralose”.. so I guess the closing phrase is… “sweeeeeeeeeeet”.

Tip of the Blog Hat to “Mr Small Pieces” a.k.a Joho The Blog.

BlinkList is a tool that allows you to create a mental map of the internet of sites that are important to you. It’s a bookmarking manager designed to work in the same way your brain stores data and thinks about things. When we launch the full version in Oct 2005 BlinkList will be the most powerful bookmark manager in existence.

To boldly go where no bookmark manager has gone before! To Infinity and Beyond!

Yup, this makes number 17 of the bookmark sites available on the Make Your Own Multipost Bookmarklet Tool. How many are in your wallet?