I’ve been obsessed with del.icio.us lately. I’ve got several different things to say about it, and it may take me a while to exhaust my interest in writing about this site. I’ll have some things to say about Digg, too, but not right now. As a resource my del.icio.us account may be the most rewarding search tool I use, mainly because of the sharing feature that shows me who else has linked to the same things as I. Because of that, I’ve created my own personal internet with a bunch of stuff that is uniquely suited to my interests. When I first started using it about 6 months ago, it seemed strangely barren of any documentation. I fussed with it and saved things as I ran across them, but my interest remained for the most part at what you might call a normal level.

But then I discovered my inbox. I subscribed to it’s feed with BlogBridge and began a feeding frenzy of sorts. Actually I found BlogBridge because I was subscribed to my inbox with Thunderbird. They are both open source applications. Thunderbird was a good tool as far as it went, but it lacked the synchronization feature of BlogBridge that lets you keep your feeds organized among different computers, and more importantly BlogBridge lets you tag your del.icio.us account. BlogBridge also has a smartfeeds feature that gives you direct access to flickr tag searches, Amazon, and a few other sites. Maybe you can begin to see where this all leads. BlogBridge is a whole other topic that might be worth writing about soon. A new release is due out shortly.

The people who I first added to my del.icio.us inbox were people who posted verbose descriptions of the links they kept. I put their names into the inbox because the aggregator only registered when someone left a description. Some people don’t put anything in the description field, and the aggregator isn’t much help then. Some of the descriptions were written as commentary, as well, and reading them is almost like reading a short blog entry. Then I discovered Collaborative Rank from a link left by Alan Levine, and noticed that I had something called “experts” who were people that shared certain linking / tagging behaviors with me. So I looked at their tags, and if they were verbose decribers I put their names in my inbox as well. Now it’s really out of control.

The most recent chapter of this little saga is that I recently found a new del.icio.us help page. This evening I followed the tagrolls link and installed a new tagroll in my blog sidebar. The tagroll preference panel has a graphic interface that allows you to choose a color scheme and the size of the cloud (if you choose a cloud), as well as the size of the font, and a couple of other options, as well. I like it.

While I’m on the subject, mentioning the sidebar, I also put up a new top-10-posts plugin that displays my most popular link. It styled well with the rest of the sidebar text. I wonder why it only has 5 links in it, though. Maybe it will have to be there a while before the new database table gets populated. Time will tell.

Update-Nov. 22: I was partly right about the database getting populated. It’s true, and it will take a while for it to begin to reflect where the traffic is really coming from. Also I had to paste the code into a few other files, like single.php and archive.php in order for the hits that come from search engines to be counted. I’m guessing a couple of weeks….and it looks (from mybloglog.com) like the tag cloud was of interest to a few people, too. Have at it!

In the meantime, I’ve still got a few more things to say about del.icio.us.