What Else I Have Missed Recently? More Subscription Management Tools in Delicious

Long time readers of this blog might remember that I used to play in public with the delicious social bookmarking service all the time, advocating the use of social bookmarks through presentations and workshops, as well as demoing various visualisations; but whilst I now use delicious regularly as a place to dump bookmarks for future reference(?!), as well as the occasional bit of syndication through my augmented blog feed via a feedthru tag, I haven’t really been keeping up with the innovations they occasionally, and quietly, roll out.

If you haven’t looked at delicious lately, here are few things you can do with it that you might not have realised:

– browse links in delicious: for a particular set of links, browse through the web pages one at a time. If you do presentations that demonstrate, or show off, a lot of web pages, this can be a really handy tool (e.g. Browse Links in Delicious – Another OUseful Prototype Unprediction Comes True:-));

– advanced search operators: as well as being able to search through your bookmarks, your network’s bookmarks, or everyones’:

you can also filter within a particular tag:

Tag based filtered searching is also possible using the tag: search limit, as is searching by site: or filetype:

Something that was definitely new to me as I was having a play yesterday were tag based subscriptions, subscription bundles, and network bundles.

Tag based subscriptions allow you to subscribe to a feed of links that are being bookmarked with a particular tag. For example, you might use this approach to subscribe to a list of links being tagged with a course code:

Subscription bundles allow you to collect a stream of links from several tag subscriptions together. So for example, if you are subscribing to several conference tag bookmark feeds, you could collate them all in one big “conference” subscription bundle. (Essentially, subscription bundles allow you to subscribe to a set of OR’d tags). It’s also possible to subscribe to a tag as used by a particular user:

Then we can create subscription bundles around separate subscriptions:

We can also search within the metadata (title, description) of bookmarks collected across my subscriptions.

Network bundles allow you to group different members of your delicious network together so that you can view their combined new bookmarks in a single feed (i.e. providing the ability to look over recent bookmarks from an OR’d set of users in a single place). Creating a bundle is easy:

Then we can view a feed of the new bookmarks saved by those users:

As to how you can get hold of this information for your own purposes, there are several relevant feeds provided:

Bookmarks from a user’s subscriptions:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/subscriptions/{username}

Bookmarks from members of a user’s network:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/network/{username}

Bookmarks from members of a user’s network by tag:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/network/{username}/{tag[+tag+…+tag]}

We can also get a feed from a network bundle. For example:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/network/psychemedia/bundle:edtech

or from a subscription bundle, as this URL demonstrates:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/subscriptions/psychemedia/bundle:Cogdog%20Horizon%20Scan

Finally, we can get feeds out based on a user’s “social network” in delicious. For example:

– a list of a user’s network members:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/networkmembers/{username}

– a list of a user’s network fans:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/networkfans/{username}

What’s of interest to me about these tools is the way they provide different ways of helping you organise sets of links based on who has bookmarked them and how they have been tagged. Even if you don’t use delicious, I think it’s important to at least be aware that this model exists for managing and routing resources discovered by others in a social setting.

PS [via @deburca]: it seems that you can now attach a license to your feeds…:

I’m not sure I understand how this works? I can see there may be a an argument for claiming some sort of database right as a result of the way a collection is put together, but copyright? Hmmm… maybe the copyright really applies to the description and tag content used to describe the bookmarks?