More del.icio.us

(by Dr. Karl Stolley 2007)

Some of you may need a little help clarifying the del.icio.us and social-bookmarking concept a little bit. The same things is true for the RSS feeds that your del.icio.us activity generates, and how those feeds of links end up on the course web site (and potentially elsewhere) for all the world to see.

So first, del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is one of the sites, like YouTube, that people refer to when they speak about Web 2.0, which is a Web reliant on user-generated and/or user-submitted content. In Web 1.0, the primary information that people submitted to Web sites was financial, so that they could, say, buy something from Amazon.com.

The del.icio.us site, in other words, would have no content whatsoever if users weren’t all over the Web, tagging sites on their del.icio.us accounts.

Nice deal for del.icio.us, but potentially bad for users. If all of your links and tags are stored at del.icio.us, that ought to mean you and anyone interested in your links must go to del.icio.us to access them. But thanks to RSS feeds, this is not the case.

RSS, the acronym for Really Simple Syndication (as of RSS 2.0), is an application of XML. Meaning that RSS is a simple set of tags written using the rules of XML for sharing data between web servers and other web servers, or between Web servers and various software applications (like Firefox, which has some built in RSS feed reading capabilities).

By default, all pages on del.icio.us also have an RSS feed with essentially, usually exactly, the same content as the regular Web pages. This is how our course web site is able to read and collect everyone’s nms520 tags. Once that URL is known, the feeds will keep on updating as you post new items.

Here are some links to aid your use and understanding of del.icio.us:

• Firefox Buttons for del.icio.us
• Buttons for other browsers (IE, Safari)
• The del.icio.us About page
• RSS feeds at Wikipedia

Have more to add? Bookmark them in your del.icio.us account and tag them with nms520.