nate koechley's blog

http://nate.koechley.com

I have found this a useful way to use http://del.icio.us, the excellent social bookmarking site that is based on tagging.

Let’s review quickly. I post all my bookmarks to delicious. They are all viewable by the public. Mine are here: http://del.icio.us/natekoechley. One great thing about delicious is that every page on the site - every node - has an RSS feed. If all my bookmarks are viewable on the web at /username, then the feed of that content is /rss/username.

Looks like this:
http://del.icio.us/natekoechley
http://del.icio.us/rss/natekoechley

The second thing that’s great about delicious is that I can quickly and easily annotate my bookmarks with tags. For example, I have bookmarked Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian. In addition to storing the URL, I have tagged it with the following words: industrial, drawings, smithsonian, museum, design, art, history.

Each tag becomes a node.  When you are viewing my total collection of bookmarks, my username "natekoechley" is the node. It is likewise possible to view all my bookmarks for a particular tag, such as
http://del.icio.us/natekoechley/art
http://del.icio.us/rss/natekoechley/art

If you want to widen your view, you can view all "art" bookmarks for everybody on the network:
http://del.icio.us/tag/art
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/art

There is no limit to the number of tags you can have, either in general or with a single URL.

As you can see, each node - tag - get’s it’s own RSS feed. This is the functionality that creates my personalized feeds.

Reduce Email with Personalized Feeds

If you’re like me, there are a couple people in your life that you want to send links too. For me that’s my girlfriend Aimee and my family. Email isn’t perfect for this — even with family, too many urls can quickly feel like spam. A blog isn’t perfect either; links for family and close friends are often boring, in jokes, or off-topic to a wider blog audience. My solution is to use tags and RSS in http://del.icio.us, in conjunction with an RSS aggregator — My Yahoo! works perfect for this.

Step one is to flag content that they’ll like. Tagging makes this super easy, I just create person-specific tags with the format, "attn:aimee". (Use any convention you want; the colon isn’t important either, a hyphen, prior or other mark will work fine.)

With sites tagged, the special tags will begin generating RSS feeds. Any aggregator will work of course, but for family I had success recommending My Yahoo!. Now, when every my family checks their My Yahoo! page, they’ll see any new links that I flagged for their attention…. To me, this is ">100% Awesome.

While I don’t think that RSS will replace email any time soon, this is a great way to remove some unnecessary noise from the inbox while still maintaining intimate and personal relationships.

Disclaimer: I saw the "attn:xxxx" syntax on another site, it is not my original idea. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to re-locate the source. Please send me and help me locate any prior work on this approach, so that I may give proper credit. Thanks!

Update: Here is an earlier mention of this technique, though this still isn’t the place I saw the idea first. Thanks for pointing this out in the comments Brian. [2005.01.19 12:01:00]

5 Responses to “Creating Personalized Feeds with Delicious”

  1. Nate Koechley’s Blog: Creating Personalized Feeds with Delicious

    Great - how can this be automated based on a profile or preference set? See Have a Drink from the RSS firehose Nate Koechley’s Blog: Creating Personalized Feeds with Delicious. Let’s review quickly. I post all my bookmarks to delicious.

  2. Great post Nate

    I love the del.icio.us rss feeds. I use them on my business website and have been getting great feedback from visitors about the timely and informative info.

  3. Wow, that’s a really, really good idea. Thanks for pointing it out! I admit I’m still wrapping my head around what’s possible with tagging and other forms of metadata, but clear examples help me get going.

  4. Hi Nate, I’m using the same technique as described here:
    http://www.hybernaut.com/bdv/personal-delicious.html

    Joshua has also said that he wants to add a ‘for:username’
    tagging convention to del.icio.us which would allow you to
    drop something in another user’s inbox. This wouldn’t be a
    replacement, as the technique you describe uses del.icio.us
    as a backend for hosting a linkstream for someone who doesn’t
    have a del.icio.us account.

    Note that this technique works well to create linkstreams
    for groups. If members of a group post with a common tag,
    then any member of the group can read the linkstream via RSS.

    Keep on linkin!

  5. Hey Nate,

    I think the technique presents itself as a solution rather neatly, so I’m not demanding attribution here. I just meant
    to say that it’s a solution that presents itself readily, and it doesn’t require any development work–it’s a latent feature of the del.icio.us infrastructure.

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