The via: tag on del.icio.us

Pubblicato il: 17/01/2008 — Tematiche: del.icio.us,english,idee,networking culturale,soluzioni,Web 2.0

[digg-me] For me it all began last year with a message on the Yahoo! Developer Network del.icio.us mailing list. add to deliciousIn 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.

some via: tagsHow 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

Ecco i commenti

  1. […] (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, […]

  2. what I like better is putting the originating website in the via so that it can be decoded by another script.

    Commento di engtech — 22 January 2008 alle 7:48 pm
  3. 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

    Commento di nda — 22 January 2008 alle 8:16 pm
  4. @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”?

    Commento di TheFangMonster — 22 January 2008 alle 9:56 pm
  5. 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

    Commento di nda — 22 January 2008 alle 10:24 pm
  6. […] And thanks to Nicola D'Agostino for picking up the meme a year later and sparking another interesting conversation about this topic. […]

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