Distilling inbound links via del.icio.us and Furl

This is one of those found be serendipity things, what happens when you just freely poke around the web. Maybe it is obvious to many others, but it’s new to me. Some folks rely on technorati for taking a pulse of links going to their content, and it sure provides some good insight. I just blindly stumbled into two ways to look at how other people are connecting to specific URLs you may be responsible for (or just curious about).

So it started with an email notification of a Trackback from my post first on A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking (and now a 4 in 1 bookmark tool) and a new site created to be a “Delicious-Furl-Connotea-Bag” bookmarklet tool, now abbreviated to Site Submission MultiTool– Alan’s Marklet Maker.

Now although Trackback is now a spam problem and many smarter than I think it is the wrong mode of communication, I still get somehing out of it, because almost daily, Trackback connects me to some other blog author I had never heard of.

Well, this one lead me to German site I could not read, but it had an RSS feed displayed of a “furl” tag in del.icio.us (isn’t that an interesting mix!): http://del.icio.us/tag/furl where I saw my little page listed (and it was but 2 weeks old), with an indication it had been tagged by 142 other people (yikes! better check the spelling on that page!):

And clicking that pink link gives me a URL for all the other del.icio.us users who had tagged it:
http://del.icio.us/url/758f42df568733d6ceb2e9eab0b9a197

Now my hunch is that the long numeric string on the end of the URL is a “hash” or a conversion of the URL to a unique string to identify it, so there is no direct way to build it via a URL alone. You see that a majority of posts are made without extended descriptions, and the ones there are perhaps from people who have modified their bookmarklets to include the selected text from a highlighted web poge (a feature built into my Marklet Maker). But there are some ways, I have yet to do more than ponder, to look at who is delicious-ing particular sites.

So I jumped over to Furl to see if it has something similar, lo and behold it does, and even easier to use. The “About This Link” page has a form field to type in a URL– http://www.furl.net/urlInfo.jsp, so plugging my URL in there gives me a listing of 81 Furl members who have “Furled” this URL, listed first by ones that include comments, and then links to others lacking comments.

I am not writing this solely to toot my own porcupine horn and say, “Wow, 81 people Furled me”, but to suggest to look into your tools and see if there are less subtle ways they offer to examine their large holdings. Data is just data in a database, and lacks meaning until we interpret, analyze, conjecture it. I find a more interesing curiosity into who is Furling, why, what they got out of it.. Back to Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Hyperlinks are not just an incidental feature of the Web. They are what turn the Web from a library of pages into a web… nothing on the Web is independent of us and our meanings and our interests… On the Web, there’s only passion, words, and the presence of others, in grand, shifting, ineffably messy relationships. Those connections bind us into something more than we are as individual pieces of organized matter; the are what’s most real on the Web.” [SPLJ pp170-171]

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