Posts tagged as: delicious

Danny Ayers builds a reading list about reading lists

Danny has created an automatically updating reading list based on the Del.icio.us tags "readinglist+tech". I wonder if any of the reading list posts in this reading list reference reading lists? If automatic inclusion gets turned on for these lists dangerous things could happen. Of course, he has to make the obligatory "RSS sucks but I'll use it anyway" comment. Yes, RSS sucks and OPML sucks even more, but reading lists are cool. I'm glad Danny doesn't let the suckage of the spec get in the way of the coolness of the app.

Meanwhile, James Corbett has thrown out a little snark bait by saying that feed grazing is really Web 3.0. Come on now, Jimmy boy, that's just asking for trouble.

Now Joshua can buy some servers

Just as I was about to write about my desire to replace Delicious due to its lousy performance, I read about its acquisition by Yahoo!. At least Joshua Schachter will now be able to buy enough servers to handle the load. As far as the long-term impact on the search engine balance of power, I don't think the addition of Delicious will help Yahoo! as much as their future commitment to tagging. The move that really matters is a decision by Yahoo! to fully integrate tagging into their search engine, not just My Web. The principal reason to buy Delicious now is obvious, to remove it from the table before it either gets too expensive, or is bought by a competitor. No this isn't bubble mentality, it is a good business decision in a rising market.

Starting with Del.icio.us

I'm attending this conference next week on social architecture, so I figure I better use something with tags first. I started a Del.icio.us account today to try it out. I've also added a link to my navbar, so you can keep track of my progress. What do you mean, you ask? Haven't you been using tags for years? Sorry, but I'm not going to adopt the usual tech blogger "voice of God," and pretend I've been using every new technology since before it was invented. As I said in my bio, I've been spending the last few years in grad school, and ignored the Internet bleeding-edge. You want to compare notes on Foucault?

BTW, if you feel silly typing del.icio.us (I insist on asking for a "large" in Starbucks), you can use delicious.com.

Podcast of Joshua Schachter talk

The Berkman Center has made a podcast of the luncheon talk by Joshua Schachter available.

Joshua Schachter, part 2

I went back to Harvard tonight for Joshua's second session at the Berkman Center. What I found most interesting was his philosophy towards users. This shows up in his handling of both user tagging and spam attacks. He said that he is constantly getting demands from the more control oriented users to restrict the use of tags, either by establishing stylistic rules, such as capitalization and the use of special characters, or by constraining the tags that users can create. He refuses to do this, and always strives to give the users as much freedom as possible, even if it breeds confusion and inconsistencies. As a control freak I find this troubling, but I think he is right in this case. Tagging is so new that adding constraints now will cut off the more ineteresting behaviors before they have a chance to emerge.

Another example of this philosophy is the way he handles spam attacks. He has found that the site gets spammed every couple of days, with such common tactics as entering thousands of copies of the same URL, or entering thousands of URLs with the same tag. He seems to have good back-end systems to monitor this, but instead of returning an error message, as most programmers (including me) would do, he just has the system ignore these entries and hide them from the public. He says that eventually the spammer gets the idea and just gives up. He says that if he were to present an active defense, the spammers would just use this to find new methods of attack. So instead of trying to hit back, he just wraps the abuser in cotton and waits until they get bored. Very bright.

Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us visits Harvard

I attended a luncheon discussion today with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center. He said that Del.icio.us was the first public tagging site, a technology that is now attracting lots of interest from the major search engines. Basically, it allows users to store their browser bookmarks online, and to assign text tags to them. Anyone can search for URLs using plain text or the assigned tags, or view all the bookmarks created by any user. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds based on a combination of users and tags. The web 2.0 term for this type of socially created category scheme is a folksonomy. I have only used the system for a few searches and haven't registered to create my own tags yet, so I don't have a strong impression of its usefulness as a search engine, but the 2 dozen or so attendees at today's session were pretty rabid.

A blogpulse search shows relatively high interest in both tagging and Del.icio.us, but surprisingly folksonomy doesn't register very high.

• Joshua is a pretty low key, humble guy who built the system without any real expectation of how well it would catch on. He seems to be following his instincts and user requests, rather than trying to fulfill some grand plan.
  
  
• I asked him about scaling both the technology and his role in the company, and he is taking on problems as they arise. The system is built with Mod_perl and a homegrown set of database tools. I know from my work with Slashdot that this can be scaled pretty far, but the hardware gets expensive. He has 8 employees, 6 of whom are programmers. Right now he is chief coder, architect, marketing head and CEO, which can't work for long. He said that he had just hired a President and a business development guy, but I wasn't sure if they counted within the current 8.
  
  
• 50% of his traffic is from robots. He doesn't know the cause of this, but I bet his many upcoming competitors are trying to suck his tagging database out of the system.
  
  
• Speaking of competitors, he applied for a job with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and got turned down by all of them. Now they are all adding tagging to their system, and Amazon is an investor. Del.icio.us is also being courted by companies like Comcast and Nokia.
  
  
• One of the most insightful things he said was that he refuses to post rankings of top sites, because that will just encourage people to find a way to spam the ranking system.