del.icio.us
Dave Winer is impressed with the Flickr contacts RSS feed, but I think he'd be even more impressed with the way the del.icio.us inbox works. You can subscribe to people's bookmarks, bookmarks tagged with certain things, bookmarks from people tagged with certain things (I subscribe only to Jon Udell's bookmarks tagged with 'screencast', but he hasn't added anything since October). I don't think this feature exists, so if it doesn't, consider it a request: you should be able to ignore users or tags as well. See my del.icio.us inbox for how this looks; there's an RSS feed of the whole thing at the bottom.
Since Flickr sort of offers an inbox with the RSS feed for contacts, it shouldn't be too hard—since the same company that owns the photo sharing service now owns del.icio.us—to create a Flickr inbox. Basically one RSS feed, meaning I subscribe once, but with options of which tags of photos and which users' tags of photos to include, and an ignore functionality, with a web interface to choose what to include in the bucket and what to exclude.
Also I'd love to be able to have everything in someone's inbox also come into my inbox. (The friends of my friends are also my friends.) And not for individual services, but the entire Web.
Pinder was the only one to publicly call me on it. The idea was to mark as 'favorite' in Flickr photos of good-looking women and photos of myself. Since I'm a heterosexual man, if anyone wants to say it was a subconscious effort to 'surround myself with babes', then I won't argue. Consciously it was two separate endeavours: a) keep track of the photos of women whom I thought were attractive and b) promote photos of myself that are really great, since the photographers in question are really good and they make it easier for me to look at photos of myself, normally very difficult. (I make an effort most times when there's a camera around to stay out of the shot.) But, since they were grouped together, it was, to use Pinder's phrasing, “adventures in creepiness”. Criticism accepted.
The sidebar was an experiment without planning, hypothesis or expected results, and since I didn't end up liking the results, it's gone. In its place, another experiment, in this case, with del.icio.us. The ingredients are:
- del.icio.us, obviously
- a custom script which generates a proper RSS 2.0 feed with <category> elements, because del.icio.us is dumb
- Drupal
- the experimental aggregator2 module
- PHPTemplate with a custom node.tpl.php for the 'aggregator2' node type.
The end result if my del.icio.us bookmarks on the justagwailo.com domain, complete with comments. On the front page of the site, there should be a comments form and permanent link for each bookmark as well as for each tag. See, for instance, bookmarks I've tagged with 'me', which are external links of either stuff I've written or something about me. For those who are into that kind of thing, there's also my del.icio.us tag cloud: it just has a weighted list of the top tags, not all of them.
I have no idea if anybody's doing what I'm doing, at least with regards to setting up a comments page for each individual del.icio.us bookmark. del.icio.us bookmarks have been on the front page for a few months, just not a lot of people noticed them because they weren't in the RSS feed. Since I can post up to a dozen a day, it would be a little much for most people.