This is an interface for browsing the items collected in a 'tag' by a user of the del.icio.us social-bookmarking system.
In the title bar of this interface you'll see something like "74 Resources tagged: gender by egcrf". In that example, it would mean that a user called 'egcrf' has assigned the tag 'gender' to 74 items which she has added to her del.icio.us bookmarks, and that those items are being displayed here, along with their related tags.
del.icio.us is a simple and free web service that lets you collect and tag links to content on the web. Because you can easily add as many tags as you like to the links you collect, you can organise your bookmarks quickly and flexibly. Because del.icio.us keeps your bookmarks online, you can access them from any computer with an internet connection, and it is easy to share your collection with others.
Once someone has collected some interesting links 'in' a particular tag, that user often wants to share the resource they are building with others. del.icio.us users often find that 'linking to one of their tags' is a quick and powerful way to direct their readers and colleagues to materials they've collected which are relevant to a conversation, topic or task. (Even better, they can add new materials to the resource after sharing the link - it's a way of making and sharing 'hot', 'live' lists of resources).
That's where this interface comes in. In the del.icio.us system, every user/tag has its own URL, but that URL does not always make the best place to send one's readers.
...In order to make what follows clearer, let's imagine a particular del.icio.us user called Lucy. If Lucy wants to share a list of items with someone, it is very easy to link to the tag in the del.icio.us site (the links have a predictable form). The del.icio.us site lists the items collected in her tag, along with the tags 'related' to it. (In del.icio.us, 'related' means that Lucy has assigned both the tags to at least one item she's collected).
But that means Lucy is sending the reader to the del.icio.us site, where she cannot add any special instructions for her own readers. She would prefer to be able to embed her tag-browser within the content that it is relevant to, and which makes sense of it in the context in which she wants to share the tag.
The interface you are presently looking at is a tag-browser which is meant to meet that need. It:
As noted above, this interface displays del.icio.us bookmarks and related tags, given a del.icio.us username and one or more tags to define a list of resources. In the title bar of this interface you'll see something like "74 Resources tagged: gender by egcrf". In that example, it would mean that a user called 'egcrf' has assigned the tag 'gender' to 74 items which she has added to her del.icio.us bookmarks, and that those items are being displayed here, along with their related tags.
Use this interface to:
icon to display extra options in the area at the right (replacing the related tags display). Tick/untick check-boxes to change settings such as whether listed items open in a new window when clicked, and whether the notes and tags are shown with every item. Click the icon again to go back to normal viewing.
icon at the top-left, copy that link-location, and paste it in your feed-reader (if you use Safari you can just click the link to effect this; likewise we expect that Internet Explorer 7 users will be able to just click the link in future). If you do not yet have an RSS reader, we recommend you find out more about it... RSS feeds let you keep track of items as they are collected in del.icio.us in flexible ways. Many millions of other RSS feeds are available as well, for various kinds of web content, news, weather and sports updates etc.
icon at the top left to go to the del.icio.us site's display for the currently showing tag(s). At the del.icio.us site you will have access to extra "social" information - for instance you can see who else has bookmarked a link, or view items collected by other users for the same tag, or popular items for that tag. The del.icio.us site also lets you combine more than 2 tags to really narrow down the list in big collections. (Note that the names of the tags in the title area of the interface (top-left) are also links to del.icio.us - if there is a combination of tags being shown, each tag links to its own view in del.icio.is and the '+' links to the combination).Note that this is just the beginning of a series of interfaces we'll be writing over the rest of the summer. The next step is a whole-account tag cloud interface to accompany this one-tag viewer, followed by an interface for browsing del.icio.us bundles and some added interactivity in this interface. We'll be writing about our other plans for these and other tools soon.
We will be releasing versions of this tag-viewer over the summer as open source. The SpiffySearch code we have used is free to use so long as you do not change the comments in Kent's css and javascript files and leave the link intact.
If you want to start using this code now, contact Mike - at - theknownet - dot - com and we'll send you the files you need. In august we'll have 'proper' releases as Plone products and plain html-css-js embeds.
It is very easy to get started with del.icio.us. See the items I've collected in my basic-intro-materials + del.icio.us tags for some introductions to the del.icio.us system. You can register quickly at the del.icio.us site.