What do they think of me?

posted 04:15PM Oct 18, 2007 with tags bookmarks delicious statistics tags by Lars Trieloff

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:

2.0 ajax amazon apple application architecture article b3mn blog browser business code collaboration collaborative_software communication competition competitors cool css design development ecommerce-software entrepeneurship entrepreneurship framework fun funny gk-intern google howto html http humor iphone java javascript job jobs mac management market marketing office online opensource osx pr programming reference rest ruby rubyonrails search social socialsoftware software startup tips tool tools tutorial usability vc video web web2.0 webdesign webdev wiki xml

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.

Metadata in your Gnome desktop

posted 03:59PM Feb 07, 2007 with tags desktop gnome metadata tags by Lars Trieloff

I wrote about the potential of metadata on the desktop before (A taggable web, a taggable desktop, a taggable workspace and it is good to see the progress of the Tracker project which adds rich metadata facility to the Gnome desktop.

A taggable web, a taggable desktop, a taggable workspace

posted 11:16PM Jul 20, 2006 with tags collaboration desktop macosx metadata tags vennt web20 by Lars Trieloff

The concept of tagging is not new (in the old times it was called keywords), but with web applications like del.icio.us (which I use regularly), Technorati or flickr, using tags or keywords as lightweight metadata has become popular again. The nice thing about tagging is that it allows you to categorize data according to more than one criteria, opposed to strictly hierarchical organization schemes like folder hierarchies or taxonomies. What is new about tagging in Web 2.0 applications? First, there is the concept of folksonomies which helps uses finding the best tags based on tags assigned to an item by other users. But the most important improvements are new user interfaces that make tagging very easy by adding type-ahead suggestions, browser extensions and bookmarklets and tag clouds that make tagging an web item just a matter of klicking the bookmarklet, klicking some suggested tags and hitting return.

The exciting news is that tagging is slowly moving from the web to the desktop. Desktop innovation happens at slower pace than web innovation, mostly due to the fact that there are much longer release cycles, but some applications like leaftag for the Gnome desktop (screenshots, video), the Quicksilver tagging module for Mac OS X (described by Livehacker as 'Metadata as a filing system') and some interesting fake screenshots of a tagging feature for Mac OS X Leopard, which look very good show the direction of development. All modern filesystems support metadata as file attributes. It is now up to the desktop developers to implement tagging interfaces for this new kind of lightweight metadata.

If we take a look ahead we will see in some years metadata-enabled desktops, metadata-enabled websites and tagging an accepted orgainizational principle. What we should be looking for is a metadat-enabled workspace environment that takes up the opportunities of tagging and lightweight metadata and support sharing of this metadata to be able to organize the data of collaborative workspaces, knowledgespaces, taskspaces and conversationspaces. An example of a tagging-centric organization of conversationspaces is vennt, an online forum software I discussed before.

Posting from del.icio.us to Roller

posted 10:05AM May 09, 2006 with tags blogs delicious tags tips by Lars Trieloff

I finally figured out how to configure del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service to post a daily batch of bookmarks to my Roller weblog:
  1. Create an account at del.icio.us
  2. Login to your account
  3. Click on 'settings'
  4. Click on 'Experimental'->'daily blog posting'
  5. Create a new job with any job name, use your Roller login name as 'out_name', your Roller password as 'out_pass', the XML-PRC-URL of your Roller installation as 'out_url', in case of weblogs.goshaky.com, the correct URL is http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/xmlrpc, enter the value '0' for 'out_cat_id' and 'out_time' (I've found no other values to work) and the ID of your weblog, e.g. 'lars' as 'out_blog_id'.
Now del.icio.us will post all links bookmarked at del.icio.us in the last 24 hours every day at midnight to your weblog. If you add some additional CSS to your weblog's template, you can customize the appearance of the blog posting.

Update, the URL has been changed from /xmlrpc to /roller-services/xmlrpc

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