dsandler.org

Kevin Hale: The Importance of RSS (to Google, mostly). [from Slashdot]

And so RSS feeds provide Google all the goodness of blogs without all the semantic garbage that might come with a system open to users that are not the content provider. RSS feeds provide Google clean data, good data and thanks to wide-spread adoption by companies and the major blog software entities, lots of it.

[…]

In addition to improving their search results, I think another reason Google is embracing RSS is because they don’t want to have to compete with it.

Kevin also offers us all a nice sound-bite of the zen of syndication:

For those of us that have adopted RSS feeds, gone are the days of wasting time making the rounds through over 100 bookmarks just to see who might have said something new. Gone are the days of waiting for the few obsessive compulsive bloggers who actually did that to post their findings so the rest of us could stay informed. Subscription makes it easy. Subscription makes it efficient.

Joshua Schachter has set up a proper weblog for his social bookmarking site, del.icio.us (of which I am one of but thousands of users, and which inspired the tags you see over on the left).

Be honest: Is dsandler.org usable? Just this once, comments are open.

(continued…)

del.icio.us is Joshua Schachter’s little bookmark manager that could (which began as muxway, his scrapbook for potential items to post to his popular Web culture collection, memepool). Josh sent this to the delicious-discuss list this afternoon:

After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I’ve decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time.

Update 3/30: Slashdot happens to be carrying an article today about del.irio.us, an open Perl implementation of del.icio.us. +5 Funny:

What’s really amazing is that in the course of copying it, the few things they changed all managed to make it look worse. I guess that’s how you tell it’s open source.

(There we go, blowing my whole bang-quota for today, just in the title.) So, all this fancy tagging is placing a non-trivial load on the DB; typical page generation takes about 4 or 5 seconds, which really sucks for a front page.

Staticize to the rescue.

(continued…)

I’ve been using del.icio.us for several months now; in that time, my brain has readily adapted to ad-hoc tag-based classification of objects. I had originally intended for this version of dsandler.org to use only a couple of very broad categories (notebook, sketchbook, and scrapbook), but now that just seems quaint and ineffective.

So, I took action.

(continued…)

O’Reilly Network: Stewart Butterfield on Flickr.

So, partly for those reasons and partly because using the social network you can give people permission to add metadata to your photos, 71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in Flickr. That’s extremely high, even compared to software like Adobe Photoshop Album, which is designed from the bottom up to facilitate the adding of metadata. When you’re doing it for yourself, it’s like a chore, its drudgery. When you’re doing it as part of a community, in a collaborative way, it can still be a little bit of work, but the payoff is so much larger.