LINKS
I’ve added a link to my del.icio.us page on the left. del.icio.us is a weird concept. It’s basically a public bookmark system. You bookmark links on their site and then tag the link with whatever words you think are pertinant. Then when someone searches for a tag such as ‘firefox’ they get all the links various people have tagged with firefox. It can lead to some interesting finds. I suggest exploring it for awhile, you’ll find something interesting. I plan on using it much as Warren Ellis does, as a sort of outboard brain to remember stuff I want to look at later one a different machine. I’ll have a post about that concept later, it’s the end of the PC era.
I can’t yet see a secondary app for the data though. Most of the new stuff I think is interesting in the new “Web 2.0”, as people are calling it, is apps that connect other apps. I wrote a proof-of-concept script a few weeks ago where I use bloglines to give me RSS feeds then I snag the pagerank data from google to sort them by popularity. That turns out to be less than super-useful because Google’s pagerank is only 1-10 so you end up getting a bunch of 7s and only a few pages go above or below the median. But the concept is sound. I used data from two sites to make a whole new app. I can see a ton of useful things to do with the data Flickr provides (when camera put gps coordinates in the picture metadata the usefulness will go up exponentially) and I’ll probably code one or two up soon to see if they pan out. I’ll have to think on del.icio.us though, at the moment it just seems too random to do anything new with.
Since I use perl and perl is awesome, there’s almost always a very easy to use module on CPAN to access the APIs for these sites. That means I code up something quickly to see if it will work without having to spend days writing my own API stuff.
I can’t yet see a secondary app for the data though. Most of the new stuff I think is interesting in the new “Web 2.0”, as people are calling it, is apps that connect other apps. I wrote a proof-of-concept script a few weeks ago where I use bloglines to give me RSS feeds then I snag the pagerank data from google to sort them by popularity. That turns out to be less than super-useful because Google’s pagerank is only 1-10 so you end up getting a bunch of 7s and only a few pages go above or below the median. But the concept is sound. I used data from two sites to make a whole new app. I can see a ton of useful things to do with the data Flickr provides (when camera put gps coordinates in the picture metadata the usefulness will go up exponentially) and I’ll probably code one or two up soon to see if they pan out. I’ll have to think on del.icio.us though, at the moment it just seems too random to do anything new with.
Since I use perl and perl is awesome, there’s almost always a very easy to use module on CPAN to access the APIs for these sites. That means I code up something quickly to see if it will work without having to spend days writing my own API stuff.