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.
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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."
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.
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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." |
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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
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