Discussions Using Del.icio.us

August 8th, 2005

After having posted my Super-Fast Delicious Bookmarklet yesterday, it became quite a hit on del.icio.us. As I watched the links come in I noticed one recurring trend: A lot of users were tagging their links with the cryptic '%s'. I thought for a minute and realized that these users were adding the bookmarklet to their toolbar - then clicking it (which is not the right thing to do).

Anyway, why I was digging through these links I came across one user who had posed a question in his extended description:

I don't quite get this but sense it could be good - question: can the config change be adapted jus to close tab + not window?

There was an easy answer to this - so I visited his del.icio.us page looking for a way to contact him (email, web site, etc.) - but one did not exist. So this posed a quandry: How does one respond to a question on del.icio.us?

The only way that you can 'contact' someone in del.icio.us is to tag a link using the for: prepend - and that's exactly what I did.

But this brings up a couple questions:

• What should the URL for the site be?
• If your contact is browsing through lots of links - and you want him to see yours, what can you do to attract his eye to it?
• How do you make it apparent, to users who read your links but aren't that person, what it is that you're replying to?

I feel as if I was able to tackle the first two problems fairly well, but the last one posed some definite issues.

I solved the first problem by using the original URL for the link, but tacking a #for:peacay at the end. This makes the URL unique - but still provides some context for the discussion.

I solved the second problem by making use of HTML character entities, specifically the arrows. Delicious does not allow you to embed entities directly, but it does support unicode - so I simply copied the visual representation of the arrows that I wanted, pasted them into the 'description' field, and was well on my way. You can see the final result here:

The final problem is the hardest one - and I'm still not sure how to solve it. The idea of having permanent links to a bookmark on delicious has been discussed many times before. If a permanent link existed for this guy's bookmark, I could tag that URL directly - creating a sort of pseudo-threading and giving context to everyone reading it.

Being able to create a usable threading/discussion situation for del.icio.us would definitely be cool - but I'm just not sure that we're entirely there yet.

Tags: bookmark, social, delicious, del.icio.us, links, tags

1 Comment on 'Discussions Using Del.icio.us'

Jobazaar Review

July 6th, 2005

Jobazaar is a new take on combining tagging with auction-style job sites. The premise for the site is that an employer makes a post offering up a job, prospect employees join and post their bid onto the job. This is all virtually identical to a number of other job-bid websites - a popular one being Rent-A-Coder. I'm going to review, first, the concept of job bidding and then the value added by this web site.

Job Bidding Personally, I really dislike job bidding. It may seem like a 'great way' to find work, considering that there are so many jobs listed (on popular job sites), but the truth is that in order to actually win a job you have to drop your total bid to a demeaning level. I find that for jobs that I would normally contract out to about $25/hour end up being close to minimum wage, instead - which is highly impractical. Personally, I feel that blind 'auctions' really are a better way to acheive a better result - since no one can know what the lowest bid is, no one can undercut it.

Jobazaar Differences The main difference between Jobazaar and any other job-bidding web site lies in the fact that it uses tags as a categorization system, and I'm not entirely sure if it works as intended. Application developers seem to be missing the fact that tagging does not make for a good 3rd party categorization system. It's good for finding your own items because you're the one writing the tags. You may say 'web' and 'perl', I may cay 'cgi' and 'lamp'. The advantage to having a strict categorization, like what Rent-A-Coder has, is that you know exactly where the jobs are that you want (for example 'Perl > CGI > Databases').

The two aspect of Jobazaar that I like is the fact that you can track job postings in your newsreader, using rss, and that they have a public blog available, soliciting feedback. Both of these are incredibly useful - and a smart decision.

In a nutshell, I don't think that Jobazaar adds that much value to the typical job-bid model, available elsewhere on the Internet, to warrant its existence. Unless it begins to gather a serious userbase (which it doesn't have, at this time), it may be too late for it to work at all.

Tags: jobazaar, programming, review, jobs, tags, tag, business, bid, auction

3 Comments on 'Jobazaar Review'

Tag Dualities

April 13th, 2005

Something that I've found to be amusing: Finding items on del.icio.us that have been tagged with dualities - complete opposite tags. Some examples:

• North and South (Maps)
• East and West (A few map related posts)
• Up and Down (Not much...)
• Left and Right (Very popular, left and right politics, left and right side of brain, etc.)
• True and False (Did someone tag a link with every word on a site?)
• Black and White (Photography and a computer game)
• Yes and No (None!)

This may not actually mean anything, but I just found it amusing, nonetheless.

Tags: tags, del.icio.us

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Delicious Colors

April 5th, 2005

On April 1st a new 'color' feature was added to del.icio.us and I am not a big fan of it (in it's current state). What follows is an email that I sent to the del.icio.us mailing list last night (and which has yet to illict a response, unfortunately).

Hello,

Let me start by saying that I'm not entirely sure if the 'colors:'
addition that appeared on April 1st was a joke, or not, but I think
it's the start of a good idea and can be improved upon. Now, with that
in mind, I have some very serious problems with 'color:'.

1) I was reading a delicious RSS feed of one of my friends and saw a
link to one of these new color: items, I clicked it (not thinking) and
was immediately treated to an error message. Up until this point I had
thought that this addition was amusing, and mildly interesting at best.
Now I was just annoyed and very upset. Essentially, this URI will only
work on delicious and will only ever have meaning to those who view
this information on the delicious web site. This is a serious problem.

2) There is no way to find other people who link to the same color
scheme, if the colors are in a different order. Or find color schemes
which have the colors that you wish to query. Or colors that are
frequently used with the colors that you pick. Nothing. It is
completely broken contextually.

Now, how to fix this:

Take a sample entry, as it exists right now:

url: color:FF0000,FFFFFF,0000FF
title: Red with and blue!
desc: Go america (or france)!
tags: colors america france

and now consider this:

url: http://del.icio.us/tag/color:FF0000+color:FFFFFF+color:0000FF/
title: Red with and blue!
desc: Go america (or france)!
tags: colors america france color:FF0000 color:FFFFFF color:0000FF

Note: You don't have to use the delicious tag URL at all - this simply
exists to give non-delicious users some context to what is being
discussed, another url discussing the color scheme could work equally
as well (such as the one generated by
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html ). Additionally,
someone could even link to a web site and describe colors that relate
to that site (e.g. http://google.com/ and color:FFFFFF).

Now, what does this afford you?
1) You do not break the existing use of delicious. Currently, it is
exclusively used to store URLs and is easily transportable (from one
data source to another or from one person to another).

2) Someone who is viewing this information from an outside source (e.g.
NOT on delicious) can still get information on what the 'url' actually
means, as opposed to a meaningless string of text which provides
errors.

3) No modification to the existing form of delicious. You could make it
such that color:* items have a background color of that color - or
maybe the text becomes that color, regardless, it doesn't break
anything. It could even be a user option to enable/disable if it
bothers them.

4) The order of the colors no longer matters. Using the 'joins' (+) you
can find all matching tag groups, or as some people might like to call
them 'color schemes'.

5) You can now do very interesting searches:
/tag/color:FF0000/ will give you everything tagged with red
...and it will give you a list of related tags (and colors?) to red

/tag/color:FF0000+color:0000FF/ will give you everything tagged with
red and blue
/tag/color:0000FF+color:FF0000/ so will this

6) It's also important to note that the use of hex codes is not
exclusive:
color:255,255,255
color:white
color:FFF
color:FFFFFF
Should all mean the same thing (by definition). Granted, each tag may
mean different things to different people, which is an important
distinction, in my opinion (hex may mean more to a web designer, rgb
may mean more to a programmer, a name may mean more to a non-technical
person, for example)

I think it's really important that this feature be re-thought, because
as it stands right now it's breaking what delicious was intended for
(or what delicious is being used for). An article on this matter can be
found here:
http://juliamae.com/hci/information-architecture/delicious-color-
sharing/

I'm curious as to what other people have to say concerning this issue,
as it's really bothering me right now (even though it probably
shouldn't, this much) and can really be made into something rather
useful and positive, as a whole.

John Resig
http://ejohn.org/
jeresig@gmail.com

Tags: colors, delicious, del.icio.us, tags, links

3 Comments on 'Delicious Colors'

Delicious Tag Auto-Complete

March 28th, 2005

The big news of the weekend was the release of the Delicious Tag Auto-Complete extension using Greasemonkey.

Friday afternoon, Julia mentioned the fact that an auto-complete utility for delicious would be very handy. So, a couple hours later, I had hacked one together, using Greasemoneky as the delivery device. I publicized it through the delicious mailing list and posted a link to my account, and within 24 hours I had the top spot on delicious popular - which is rather exciting. (I have a screenshot at home, which I will upload later.) I'm really intrigued by how quickly the whole thing propogated. Apparently, it doesn't take much to spread the word around the community of delicious users. I have a couple more projects up my sleeve that I'll probably release here within the week, and we'll have to see how well they fair in comparision.

Tags: auto, del.icio.us, greasemonkey, javascript, tags

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