The via: tag on del.icio.us
[digg-me] For me it all began last year with a message on the Yahoo! Developer Network del.icio.us mailing list. In the message, thefangmonster[0] was introducing a a bookmarklet to make easier the saving of a particular tag when adding bookmarks on del.icious.
This particular tag is the “via:” one which is “intended to be a corollary to the for: tag, albeit an unofficial one”. It is in fact a totally unofficial tag[1], which nonetheless may help immensely in giving credit (whereand if credit is due) and keeping track of who your links are coming from.
How does it work?
- Anytime you save a bookmark, whether by posting or saving from another user, add one more tag, a “via:source” where “source” is the name or nick on delicious or the name of the website or author if he has no account
- When you want to see all the links you got from a particular source you can use it as a tag.
http://del.icio.us/nicoladagostino/via:rentzsch is an example of all the urls I got from well-known developer Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch[2] - In some instances, if adopted by the users, it can even show additional info about the history of the link, as you can see I got it from my friend Nicola “koolinus” Losito and when later aqualung grabbed from me he added me as a source but also kept the original via: tag [3].
As you can see it’s a small addition that can be very useful if you’re a writer (like me) or researcher, if you are interested in the inherent “social” features of bookmarking or simply if you like to think credits (and thanks) should have their a place on del.icio.us
Notes:
[0] who I’d like to thank for the epiphany
[1] although mentioned in summer 2005 in an offhand remark by del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter.
[2] who also has a del.icio.us account.
[3] which after all should be expected since it looks like he got the original idea to use via: tags at the beginning of 2005
[…] (View All 981) nezmar.com ยป The via: tag on del.icio.us http://www.nezmar.com/the-via-tag-on-delicious/ Rated 5 stars out of 5. Details Tags: del.icio.us, tags, social bookmarking, howto, credits Saved by Nicola Losito on January 17, 2008. Configuring WP Permalinks http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/01/16/configuring-wp-permalinks/ Rated 3 stars out of 5. Details Tags: permalink, wordpress, howto Saved by Nicola Losito on January 17, […]
what I like better is putting the originating website in the via so that it can be decoded by another script.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to do when the source is not a del.icio.us user (also for post-processing, but also for crediting reasons).
An example is the url/info I got from the mailing list on the http://www.sikurezza.org website that is archived under the via:sikurezza.org tag.
nda
@engtech: I think that putting the originating site into a via tag is an interesting idea. Certainly all the time I find a link through some blog, but then I bookmark the original page, not the blog where I actually found the link, and that information is lost.
Another idea that’s been around for a while (its in the original Aqualung post, iirc) is nesting of via tags. Right now if I save one of your links that you’ve tagged “via:homer,” then I wind up with 2 via: tags: “via:engtech” and “via:homer.” But I can’t tell which came first.
So would it be better to concatenate the via: tags into a sort of colon-delimited list, where the order of the usernames in the list indicates who tagged first — so I’d wind up with the single tag “via:homer:engtech”?
Thefangmonster: usually there’s a time gap between the first bookmark and the others an thus you can tell who is the original source just looking at the del.icio.us info page.
I found that the via: tag pretty much complements it.
nda
[…] And thanks to Nicola D'Agostino for picking up the meme a year later and sparking another interesting conversation about this topic. […]