This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.

Here's how I did it:

1. I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
2. I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
3. We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
4. We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.

Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve. 

This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.

Here's how I did it:

1. I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
2. I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
3. We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
4. We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.

Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve. 

I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks.

Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t something that can organize your favourite web links that will work better than your browser’s favourites collection.
Step 2: Lie awake at night, wondering whether you should use Furl or Spurl or del.icio.us.

Step 2a (optional): Lie awake at night, wishing you’d chosen del.icio.us.

Step 3: Lie awake at night, wondering which tags you should use for all the web pages you are now adding to del.icio.us.Once you make it to step 3, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember. Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. Bear in mind that different people will bookmark the same site for different reasons: I might bookmark Terminus 1525 as a great example of a Drupal site, while you are saving it as a link to young Canadian artists.
2. Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links — this is the leading tag of the options you’re considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don’t have to check open-source, opensource AND open_source to keep on top of the big world of open source). Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you’re looking at, with the syntax http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/25. For example, http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75 pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75 gives you no links at all — demonstrating that opensource is the more popular tag of the two.
3. Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn’t work — it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don’t work either. So if you tag something “camel case” it will show up on the tag page for “camel” and the tag page for “case”.
5. Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work ok. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don’t think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled web services that comma separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
6. Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags “open” and “source” — so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source — is a lot less useful than giving it the opensource tag. But rather than using the tag canadianpolitics, try using two tags: Canada and politics. That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
7. Hang out at crossroads. If you’ve followed the guideline above to use two separate tags rather than smooshing two words into one tag, find the resources you’re interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tags politics, you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics into your browser’s address bar.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts. If you’re part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
9. Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you’ve used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can alway re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags — so if you tagged a bunch of stuff “food” that you later wish you’d tagged as “cooking”, you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier — you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you’d edit a file name in the finder.
10. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog. Or at least, they will know — if you tag a photo of yourself with the word “dog”. That’s right, you’re tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag “enemies” for your business competitors, or “prospects” for all the folks you’re pitching.
11. Shh! This one’s for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you’re tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the “for:” tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague’s del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it “for:username”. So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you’d tag it “for:awsamuel”.
12. Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us-users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind, and get del.icio.us.

When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.

And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.

When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.

And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.

read more

I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks.

Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t something that can organize your favourite web links that will work better than your browser’s favourites collection.
Step 2: Lie awake at night, wondering whether you should use Furl or Spurl or del.icio.us.

Step 2a (optional): Lie awake at night, wishing you’d chosen del.icio.us.

Step 3: Lie awake at night, wondering which tags you should use for all the web pages you are now adding to del.icio.us.Once you make it to step 3, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember. Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. Bear in mind that different people will bookmark the same site for different reasons: I might bookmark Terminus 1525 as a great example of a Drupal site, while you are saving it as a link to young Canadian artists.
2. Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links — this is the leading tag of the options you’re considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don’t have to check open-source, opensource AND open_source to keep on top of the big world of open source). Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you’re looking at, with the syntax http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/25. For example, http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75 pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75 gives you no links at all — demonstrating that opensource is the more popular tag of the two.
3. Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn’t work — it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don’t work either. So if you tag something “camel case” it will show up on the tag page for “camel” and the tag page for “case”.
5. Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work ok. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don’t think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled web services that comma separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
6. Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags “open” and “source” — so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source — is a lot less useful than giving it the opensource tag. But rather than using the tag canadianpolitics, try using two tags: Canada and politics. That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
7. Hang out at crossroads. If you’ve followed the guideline above to use two separate tags rather than smooshing two words into one tag, find the resources you’re interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tags politics, you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics into your browser’s address bar.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts. If you’re part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
9. Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you’ve used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can alway re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags — so if you tagged a bunch of stuff “food” that you later wish you’d tagged as “cooking”, you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier — you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you’d edit a file name in the finder.
10. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog. Or at least, they will know — if you tag a photo of yourself with the word “dog”. That’s right, you’re tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag “enemies” for your business competitors, or “prospects” for all the folks you’re pitching.
11. Shh! This one’s for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you’re tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the “for:” tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague’s del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it “for:username”. So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you’d tag it “for:awsamuel”.
12. Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us-users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind, and get del.icio.us.

TechSoup invited me to be part of their online event on Web 2.0 this week. Since I was on call for a discussion about social bookmarking and aggregation, I put together a short overview of how aggregation can help nonprofits, and another on how social bookmarking can help nonprofits.

Here’s my quick take on three crucial ways that nonprofits can use RSS and aggregation to work more effectively:

1. Automatically populate websites with up-to-date content: It’s very expensive to create original content on a regular basis. If you set up a series of RSS feeds on a particular topic that can pump useful content onto your organization’s web site; you’re adding value to that content by selecting a particular combination of topics and sources. For example, an organization that advocates for women with HIV might create an RSS-driven news section on its web site that pulls relevant web resources from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr, and blog posts from Technorati (a bit tricky to set up as a RSS feed, but doable; the trick is to set up the search as a “watchlist”, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the watchlist.)
2. Create a media monitoring site: You can create a media monitoring tool for internal use only. Something as simple as a Bloglines account can become a clearinghouse for information that helps with your work. That can include RSS feeds for Google or Yahoo news searches on particular search terms; del.icio.us feeds for resources related to your work; or news feeds for major publications in your field.

   I’d figure that most nonprofits would benefit from setting up a media monitoring site with RSS feeds that cover the following:

   • Search of major news feeds (try Google News or Yahoo News) for the name of your organization, acronym (if any), major sub-brands/projects, and/or name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of major news feeds for keywords on the issues you need to track. Play with the search terms until you get the right volume of news; if you’re an organization that works on a major policy area (e.g. healthcare) you may need to narrow down your search until it gives you a manageable amount of news [e.g. "healthcare policy (Congress or President)"].
   • Search of blogs (using Technorati or Feedster) for your organization and name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of blogs for your issue keywords.
   • del.icio.us, Furl & Flickr tag pages for your organization’s name and key issue areas. Don’t forget that del.icio.us lets you set up feeds that are narrowed down by using multiple tags (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/healthcare+policy)
   • del.icio.us, Furl & blog (Technorati/Feedster) search on your chosen team tag (see below)
   • For a local organization, search feeds that search your issue keywords within the news feeds for all your major local papers and broadcast outlets (you can set up a Bloglines account that includes all your local media, then set up a keyword search that searches all the feeds in your account; then set up a second Bloglines account as your main media monitoring site, and subscribe to the keyword search from the first account).
3. Choose a team tag: Choose a tag that your staff, board and volunteers can use to share information and resources. Encourage your team to use del.icio.us, furl or another social bookmarking service to save web resources they find personally useful or want to share with the team. Encourage bloggers to use that tag on any post they want team members to read. And then make sure your team monitors the tag regularly by visiting your media monitoring site, or adding the RSS feed for the tag (from del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati) to their personal home pages in Google.

I hope this is helpful. Tips on how nonprofits can use social bookmarking will follow shortly.

Debra Roby, one of the folks at our powerbloghers session, blogged & emailed with these questions:

1. Tagging. why should I care? and how do I do it?
2. Social bookmarking. same question.
3. Setting up a wiki?? Where, why and most importantly how??

Let me tackle each one in turn:

Tagging. Why should I care? and how do I do it?

I can’t resist the urge to refer tagging newbies to my article for the Toronto Star, which was meant to give people an overview of the why and hows of tagging. But let me also try for an abridged version.

Tagging is the ability to assign topical keywords to a wide range of digital content, like photos, bookmarks (favourite web sites) and blog posts. It matters because:

• Just like the Internet itself, it’s self-governing. Nobody’s choice of tag is the correct, authoritative tag for a given page or piece of content; everybody gets to choose for herself what word or words will help her find a piece of content again. Finally, information architecture that matches the structure and spirit of the Net!
• Tags are non-hierarchical: unlike the frequently-seen system of nested categories or nested folders (for example, “animals” is a category and “dogs” is a subcategory), tagging treats all topics as equal — so you can have associations among different tags without having one be “above” the other. In a related point…
• Tags are non-exclusive: you don’t have to choose which tag to use. So if you find a great piece of software to connect your Mac and your Treo (to take a hypothetical example) you can tag it “Mac” and “Treo” and “software”.
• Tags enable collaboration. The same tag that helps you find that Treo software can help everybody else find it too. Cool, huh?
• Tags make us into better human beings. Really. Because while I’m saving that Treo link it occurs to me that other people might think to look for it under “Palm”, so what the hell, I might as well save it with the tag “Palm”, too. How generous of me! Aren’t I nice person!

But that takes us to the “how” part. Basically the three most obvious ways to use tags are:

1. To store, retrieve or share favourite web links (bookmarks). del.icio.us was the first service to offer tag-based bookmarking, but there are others — see my comments on social bookmarking, below.
2. To organize, retrieve or share your photos. The big player in the photo-tagging world is Flickr.
3. To organize or find blog posts. For now that pretty much relies on using Technorati to aggregate blog posts that share the same tag. For example, you can include the code:
   <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers” rel=”tag”>powerbloghers</a>
   to include a post on the Technorati page for powerbloghers.

That last point brings us to the BIG “so what” of tagging: it allows for the distribution and aggregation of content via RSS. If you think of RSS feeds as structured web traffic, then tags are the road signs. Tags tell RSS feeds where to appear on web pages that are structured around RSS — pages like our Blogher Advanced Tools page. There’s no “real” content on that page — nothing that was posted directly to the blog. There are just a bunch of road signs that say “woohoo! over here!” whenever the tag “powerblogher” passes by in an RSS feed.

For more insights into the Meaning of Tags, check out You’re It.

Social bookmarking. same question.

Bottom line: social bookmarking sytems help you organize the web sites you want to find again in a way that makes it easy for you to find them. Unlike the “favorites” folders built into your web browser, using a social bookmarking system means you’ll be able to access your favourite web links from any computer with an Internet connection. And the same effort lets you share your links with other people who share your interest, find resources that they have recommended, and even turn your bookmarks into a great source of constantly updated content on your web page or blog.

For a great list of social bookmarking services and related resources, see Marnie Webb’s social bookmarking H20 playlist (H20 Playlist is a kind of social bookmarking system itself).

Setting up a wiki?? Where, why and most importantly how??

Wikis are web pages that people can edit collaboratively. Some uses for wikis include:

• Writing a document with a group of people or getting input/changes to a document you’ve written. Larry Lessig is revising a whole book this way.
• Taking notes on an event as a group, so that everyone shares the job of creating minutes and an event record. That’s how the folks at Aspiration use PurpleWiki, one wiki software tool.
• To organize your own notes in way that is easy, freeflowing and interlinked. Kris Krug put me onto TiddlyWiki, and a couple of comments on my recent blog post about switching from Entourage recommended VoodooPad, which I’m now trying out.

It seems like in the big world of social software there are Blog People and Wiki People. We may sometimes end up at the same conferences and we may even have interesting conversations about tagging, but if we mate we produce mutant offspring. (Nominees, anyone?)

I am afraid that I am a Blog Person — though I have great respect and affection for many Wiki People. So while I can tell you what I use for my own current, occasional wiki needs (Jotspot), I must defer wiki wisdom-seekers to people I know who are true WikiHeads.

If this were a wiki, WikiHeads would now be a hyperlink, waiting to be populated with an ever-growing list of fascinating Wiki People. But this is just a blog, so all I can do is encourage one of the Wiki People to start their own wiki of useful wiki links, and meanwhile point you towards Nancy White’s fabulous set of wiki resources.

I hope this is helpful to Debra and others — and that others will chime in with their own explanations and resources by using the powerbloghers tag.

Last weekend I presented an Advanced Tools session at Blogher, which didn’t work out exactly as planned since we lost our Internet connection in minute 2 of the session. But the very generous and eager crowd bore with our reversion to flipcharts, and we made it through and I think helped folks get their minds around some of the possibilities of integrating RSS, tags, Flickr and del.icio.us into their blogging workflow.

We promised to follow up by posting some additional resources to our Advanced Tools session web page. We were going to demonstrate how you could add resources to the page via tags and RSS; our Internet outage meant that didn’t happen in the moment, but I’m going to keep to that vision by posting some additional resources via my own blog. That’s right, folks — if you’re reading this on the Advanced Tools page, you’ll be thrilled and amazed to discover that it got their automagically thanks to RSS plus this tag: powerbloghers. If you’re not reading this on the Advanced Tools page, please note that all you need to do in order to contribute your power blogging tips and links to the world of fabulous blogging women is to use the tag “powerbloghers” on del.icio.us, or include this bit of code in a blog post:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers” rel=”tag”>powerbloghers</a>

My introduction to tagging and social bookmarking

My introduction to using an RSS newsreader — a great tool for subscribing to del.icio.us tags as well as other news and information sources

My blog posts about using del.icio.us

For more notes on choosing tags see my blog post

To really geek out on issues around tagsonomies, “folksonomies”, and tag selection, check out this blog (full disclosure: I’m on this blog too):
http://www.tagsonomy.com

And for event more del.icio.us-ness, see:

Tools that make del.icio.us even more life-altering

The del.icio.us tag page on del.icio.us — tons of resources!

The latest tool I’m exploring is H2O Playlist, a project of the Berkman Center. What is H20?

An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

What this seems to boil down to is an inteface for creating a thoughtfully structured, annotated, nice-looking topical set of web links. Given the never-ending stream of social bookmarking tools that are now available to help me manage my web links, what are the circumstances under which I’d want to hive off a subset and turn them into an H20 Playlist?

The first thing to realize is that H20 Playlist doesn’t replace your primary tool for bookmark management. It still makes sense to use something like del.icio.us or Furl to manage your overall bookmark collection. (And it would sure be nice if H20 had an import mechanism that worked with these, perhaps by allowing import from a standard mozilla bookmark file….I don’t want to have to manually move over all the bookmarks for the particular tags I want represented in a playlist.)

Where H20 comes in handy is if you’re actually trying to turn your playlist into something…prototypically, a syllabus or some sort of guide. For example I could see H20 being a nice way of organizing and annotating my list of RSS resources. Or if I were going to teach my Internet & Politics course again, I might use it to structure the online readings.

But where H20 should really be useful is when it comes to groups of people collaborating in developing curricula or other learning resources. H20 doesn’t yet facilitate that kind of collaboration, as far as I can see; you can spin somebody else’s playlist into a version of your own, but you can’t invite someone else to add to or directly annotate a playlist.

If H20’s future iterations include true group collaboration on playlists, some serious import tools — or better yet, integration or mirroring of other social bookmarking systems so one can synch playlists with del.icio.us linklists — it could prove to be a very handy tool in the social bookmarking toolbox.

As promised, I’m picking 10 sites for my bookmark bar; in fact they’re pretty much there already. Here’s what I’m going to try to live off of for the next week, with no search and no typing addresses into the address bar:

1. My blog’s admin page
2. My del.icio.us page
3. My Bloglines page (with links to all my blog and news sources)
4. My web banking login
5. My Yahoo groups page
6. My spurls
7. MyTelus
8. The admin page for You’re It
9. Omidyar
10. MacFixit

I can already tell this is going to be annoying, despite the fact that I can reach about 98% of my web destinations via the first 3 links in my list alone. I suspect that the value of this exercise is going to turn out to be the discipline it imposes on my bookmarking. While I tend to use del.icio.us a lot for things that I want to read, I tend not to bookmark sites that I actually want to use — like my bank, my local movie info (via MyTelus), and Omidyar. This week may push me into bookmarking more sites and learning how to use my bookmarks more effectively.

Beth Kanter continues our bloggespondence on social bookmarking with the very well-taken point that a prettier del.icio.us (my summary of Jots may actually be worth something if it makes social bookmarking useful to a wider audience, though as she notes herself the biggest challenge in evangelizing deli.icio.us is that its bookmark collections thin out very quickly once you get beyond core geek interests like Linux or blogging. Beth’s approach is to provide people with a
“del.icio.us cheat sheet” — please, Beth, share it with the world! — but I wonder whether the geekocracy could help in another way: by making an extra special effort to tag non-geeky topics. If every del.icio.us user were to make an effort to bookmark 10 resources on a non-geeky subject of personal interest– and not with some general tag like “politics” or “books”, but something specific like “culturejamming” or “socialsecurity” — it would rapidly expand the utility of del.icio.us for non-geeks, and help atttract others to the tool.

Beth had a couple of other questions for me:

• What’s your take on “site-independent taggregation” services arena? As of yesterday, when Technorati launched its beta makeover, things are looking up. It’s now possible to pull an RSS feed that aggregates categorized posts from different blogs, by using the Technorati tag page. But aggregating bookmark tags is still a tag-by-tag, site-by-site job. While I know there are those who see aggregation as “reblogging” — i.e. free riding on someone else’s hard work — I think that there’s an important role for topical aggregators right now (at least until we get the social bookmarking equivalent of Technorati’s RSS feed for blog tags). By setting up a page that aggregates tags from multiple bookmarking sites to capture the full range of bookmarking for a given topic or set of tags, you can create a page that offers real value for people tracking that topic. That’s what I did with the very modest OD 2005 page of deliberation links.
• You described JOTS urls-to-tags ratio as impressive (2:1). Why is it impressive? How does it compare to del.icio.us? Actually I didn’t describe it as impressive (it isn’t). I just thought it was a neat stat to display.