Aug 13
Editorial David
bookmarking, social, Twitter, url
Posting your Delicious links to Twitter
If you are a user of Delicious and Twitter, then the lovely people who develop the former have snuck in a very clever new feature to help you bring the two together. While you are adding a page to delicious you now get an extra field to fill in, “Send” which covers your delicious contacts, someone’s email address and yes, your twitter account. Selecting the latter opens up a message box for you to type your accompanying ‘tweet’.
When your post is added to Twitter, your message is posted along with a short-code URL; something that should be familiar to most web users these days. As a way of stamping their own brand on this, the short-code is from their own domain, “icio.us”, which does give your tweet a certain air of exclusivity.
This has come hot on the heels of flickr adding thier own flic.kr short codes for tweeting photos directly from your flickr account.
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Mar 16
Editorial David
bookmarking, firefox, public, shared, social, tagging, tags
Over the past few months I have been on journey with how I manage my bookmarks. Most of the time that I ran Firefox 2, I came up with the idea of having all of my bookmarks on the bookmark toolbar, via hierarchy of folders. This was fine, everything was well categorised and filed, but there were enclaves of bookmarks that I simply never dared delve into. Just for good measure, I had all my bookmarks backed up with the Foxmarks extension.
Delicious
Then two things happened; Firefox 3 came out with its tagging facility for bookmarks, and I started to use Delicious for social media reasons, namely supporting additional content for this blog.
Eventually, I succumbed to the tagging method in Firefox 3. This lead to me having less, but still lots, of bookmarks filed on my toolbar, but then an much larger amount of tagged bookmarks inside Firefox’s “Unsorted Bookmarks” folder. Although, I was also building up a healthy repository of bookmarks in Delicious too.
Over the past few months, I have been chipping away at tagging my filed bookmarks and dumping more and more of them into the unsorted folder. The idea being to forget about a hierachial structure and just use Firefox’s “Awesome Bar” to search for tags.
I have also been trying to work out how to bring in my Delicious account, and how to bring together my two sets of bookmarks. Also, the last time I had tried the Delicious plugin for Firefox, it totally took over all of Firefox’s bookmarking system. I didn’t want this as I like to have a few folders on my toolbar.
I gave the Delicious plugin another go a few days ago, and I’m pleased to say that it now happily works in parallel with Firefox’s on bookmarking system.
In the end, what I came up with, was to do a mass import of all my “unsorted” (but tagged) Firefox bookmarks into Delicious, and then delete them locally. So now, the only bookmarks I have locally in Firefox are my quick access toolbar folders. Such as, links to my social networking profiles, frequently visited forums, etc. Everything else that I’ve bookmarked for a rainy day, now resides in Delicious. Delicious has become my bookmark archive, and with it I’m contributing to a public well of knowledge of the web too. And, I have a nice and tidy bookmark toolbar to boot!
You can visit my Delicious bookmarks by clicking this: 
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Dec 22
Editorial David
bookmarking, digg, news, reddit, social, social bookmarking, social news, stumbleupon, yahoo buzz
If you’re one of those people who wonder what all those colourful little icons at the bottom of posts on blogs and news sites are for, then this blog post will hopefully be for you.
For a long time I struggled to make sense of the world of (what I vaguely termed) “social bookmarking”. There are big name sites you may have heard of, but there are even more. Although, in the view I’ve built you can seperate them into two broad sets.
I’ll start with what I call “social news”. These are sites which are best used for time relevant posts, such as posts from news sites. The sites I term as “social news” don’t tend to be so good for reference material. The strength of social news sites is to “vote up” posts, stories, etc, that are popular today or this week. They’re a constant popularity contest, and nothing stays at the top for long. As such, you don’t get anything posted that, while interesting or useful, isn’t of the moment. So to speak.
What I call “social bookmarking” sites get a much wider spectrum of sites being submitted. Rather than “voting up”, the idea of social bookmarking is for people to add whatever they find interesting.
It has been my experience that if you are looking for something specific, perhaps a tech review, the social bookmarking sites are fare more likely to find you something useful. It is unlikely that someone would go to a social news site with, say, a mobile phone review, it isn’t news, as such.
Examples of social news sites are Digg, Yahoo Buzz and Reddit. All of these sites work in the same basic way. Someone submits a site, and if other people find it interesting they vote up the story. The more votes a story has got, the more likely it is to be shown on the site’s front page.
Examples of social bookmarking sites are Stumble Upon and Delicious. Delicious is a simple concept, you submit a bookmark along with a description and “tags” (i.e. keywords). Delicious has been running for so long that there is a wealth of submitted links and searching often yields good results. Stumble Upon does the same but takes things a step further. Stumble Upon operates via a browser toolbar. On sites you visit, you can click on buttons on the toolbar to say whether you like the site or not. After Stumble Upon learn’s your preferences you can ask it to take you to recommended sites. So, not only can you search Stumble Upon, but you can let it show you things you may find interesting.
If you found this interesting and want to know more, here are some other blog posts:
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Sep 18
Website Updates admin
bookmarking, sharing, social
I’ve just added a widget called “Add to Any” for sharing my posts with social bookmarking services.
Now, it’s only visible when you click on an individual post to read the whole post, which I’m not sure is good or bad. Although once you do get to use it, it does something I’ve never seen anymore. Upon floating the cursor over over the link, it creates a drop down list of popular sites, and if you click the down arrow at the bottom of the box, it unfurls to show a lot more link sharing/bookmarking services.
I haven’t found any other way to put sharing/bookmarking icon style links at the bottom of each post, so I’ll stick with this for now. Especially since I’m very much still in the cobbling together stage of things.
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