Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

I am using del.icio.us extensively. Not only for keeping my own bookmarks, also for discovering new links (by following my network) and of course, using the for:trieloff tag in del.icio.us is the way I prefer to get informed about interesting links.

When watching some of the links I get send using this method, I ask my self: "What do they (my friends, family and co-workers) think of me?". What do they think is interesting for me and worth tagging a for:trieloff?

In order to answer this question, I wrote a small ruby script that scrapes my personal del.icio.us link inbox, searches for tags and ranks them according to their popularity. This is the tag cloud the program came up with:

If you compare this to my own tag cloud of things I blog or bookmark, you will find a big overlap. It looks like they know me quite well.

Webmasters and bloggers that want to publicise their content often add links at the footer of their website that allow posting a link to a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us, digg.com, reddit, ma.gnolia and others. But with the increasing number of social bookmarking services in use, and webmasters that want to support all of them, those litte icons are slowly taking over your website. (See David Trowbridge's blog for an example).

But there is relief: With Share This Link bloggers and webmasters get the opportunity to support many social bookmarking services at once by linking to Share This Link which is a meta-social-bookmarking service that forwards the bookmarker to her favorite service.

Share this link is heavily inspired by Alex King's Share This Wordpress Plugin, uses the icons provided by the Share Icon Project and was written using Apache Cocoon in one afternoon.

So, it is time to act now:

1. Share the Share This Link page with your favorite social bookmarking service
2. Clean up your blog template with Share This Link

Alex Faaborg writes about icon sprawl resulting from the increasing number of applications and web services that support structured web information like feeds (RSS and ATOM), reading lists (OPML), events, contacts and locations (Microformats): Structured Data Chaos. For every combination of structured data and client applications for structured data, there has to be an icon or action that adds visual clutter to the web user interface.

A similar problem appears when considering social bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, mister-wong.de (a popular german social bookmarking website) and others. Wired News calls this: Battle Over 'Iconistan' due to the increasing number of bookmarking icons that clutter the interface of news sites and weblogs.

Alex Faaborg suggests to solve this problem by implementing a solution in the browser, similar to what has happend with feed support in web browsers: The web browser is able to autodetect the structured information and cares for integrating the client application.

I've got two questions: Will browser development keep pace with the development of structured web formats or will the world have to wait another two years for an update of the world's most widely distributed web browser? And so far I have not seen any proper integration of web-based feed reading services that is supported by the feed autodiscovery feature of web browsers.

One commenter to the Wired News post recommends a wordpress plugin that hides all social bookmarking icons until you click a "share" button, something like a meta-social bookmarking plugin. It could be a solution to have a similar meta-web-service (in the web 2.0 sense, not in the SOA sense) that is able to push structured data to the desired web-based or desktop client.