Adding “del.icio.us this” and “furl this” links to your blog

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Tip of the day: you can add one click links to the end of each blog post for readers to archive that post in their del.icio.us or Furl archives. I think this makes it all the easier for people to save, return to and effectively promote your post and your site. If reading posts all in a row on the front page of a blog, you can bookmark a particular post without having to click through to it’s unique permalink pagel. Here’s how you add that option…

Inside your blog’s HTML template there should be a template for each post. In Blogger you can find the end of the post because that’s where the “leave a comment” link will be (you can add this code right after that link) and in WordPress you will have a post template file findable via presentation-template editor, or the post template will be in your main template.

In Blogger, you can add:

<em>Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a> or <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a>. (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br /></em>

In WordPress you can add:

Bookmark this post in <a href=”http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<?php the_title(); ?>&u=<?php the_permalink() ?>” target=”_blank”>Furl</a> or <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”>Del.icio.us</a><br/> (<a href=”http://marshallk.com/introduction-to-social-bookmarking/” target=”_blank”>definition</a>)<br />

As you can see perhaps, the basic code here is the same for both, what differs is how your blogging software identifies the permalink of whatever post you are on. So if you are using something other than Blogger or WordPress, you can adjust that part accordingly. And of course you can remove, replace or tweak the link to my definition of social bookmarking however you like.

Please note that Furling links this way will not save you a cached copy of the post the way Furl likes to do (thus you will get an error-ish mssg) but don’t worry, the URL and all other info you enter into the Furl box will be saved!

Let me know if this doesn’t work for you and I’ll see if I can help. Adding things like this is an example of what I do as part of my blog optimization services. If you are interested in having me set your blog up with the best in new tools for maximum impact and awesomeness, let me know. I offer blog optimization services at a very reasonable cost – your increase in traffic and sophistication will be more than worth it.

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Spate of Key Items Found re RSS, Tagging, Blogs and Wikis

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My web-friend Beth Kanter is on fire this week. She’s posted links to The World Information Society’s focus on blogs and wikis in the developing world, Alexandra Samuel’s very succinct Make Your Non-Profit More Effective with RSS and (perhaps most exciting) coverage of a recent talk by Joshua Schachter, the creator of Del.icio.us. All 3 are great resources worth checking out.

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Inequities in Web 2.0: Let’s Tag About It

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The phenomena being called Web2.0 is disproportionately influenced by white men. Issues raised by anti-racist, anti-classist and disability and gender-rights activists in other contexts are just as relevant to this new technological and political development (Web2.0) as they are to any other.

There have been some very good articles written about this situation, including for example:

So those are just some of the posts about these issues that have been commented on a lot. But how can a person find old and new blog posts, photos, podcasts or events about these subjects? I searched inside my own Furl.net and Del.icio.us archives and in the general archive for Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+gender. Interestingly, there is really only one post referred to so far in Del.icio.us/tag/web2.0+race.

These conversations would be easier to find and keep up with if there was a common tag used. I propose this: webjustice2.0. Feel free to come up with some thing else, of course. But if that sounds good to you, then the following options are available:

  • If you use the tag in any of the following:

    del.icio.us (or any similar social bookmarking service that synchs with your del.icio.us account)
    Furl.net Social Bookmarking
    Technorati Blog Search
    Flickr Photos
    43Things Goal Making/Sharing
    Upcoming.org Events, Owned by Yahoo!
    Eventful.com Events not owned by Yahoo!

  • Then it will be delivered in this RSS feed: WebJustice2.0 RSS Feed
  • If you’d like to display the 10 most recent items in the feed on your website (duplicates not removed right now) then you can copy and paste the following code into your template. Feel free to change anything you like. To see a sample of what it will look like, you can look at my blog’s sidebar.

    WebJustice2.0 Discussion<br /><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/SPQ1BO029H.js”><noscript><a href=”http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/SPQ1BO029H.html”>Click for "WebJustice2.0".</a> By <a href=”http://www.feeddigest.com/”>Feed Digest</a></noscript></script>

I am sending a link to this post to the authors of the above example articles and a few other people I think might be interested. This system should be easy to use, just subscribe to the RSS feed for tag and tag relevant items online. And of course if anyone wants to propose or use an alternate tag – there’s absolutely nothing stopping you. I hope this will help the discussion by enabling easier, more thorough participation.

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Technorati Tips

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I had the pleasure to talk to Ryan King of Technorati at Tag Camp this weekend and our conversation included a couple of things I thought I’d share with readers here.

  • Spam Blogs I saw Alex personally zapping splogs by hand from Technorati search results while we were talking! Apparently they have a variety of algorithms to do this automatically as well, but it was nice to see him care enough to clean things up when he had a minute. He also told me about having conversations with some of the big search engines about how to deal with this problem. So contrary to Dave Winer’s bizarre statement in conversation this weekend that RSS feeds for search were worthless because of the spam – I have faith that the problem is being mitigated as we speak. One way or the other, the last thing I’m going to do is give up on search-to-RSS! It’s absolutely invaluable, even if I have to take some extra time to construct less spammy queries. Unfortunately Winer was just one of several older men who were so full of themselves they had a hard time communicating with anyone around them. They didn’t contribute much either. To step back from that, I found several people who agreed with me that results are amongst the most filled with spam.
  • Indexing I’ve been conversing with several people who are having trouble getting their Typepad sites indexed by Technorati, and thus are not seeing their tags show up in tag searches there. Alex showed me the header tag that could be changed to reflect the Feedburner RSS feeds people are using. I’ll work on that and hopefully the problem will be solved.
  • Tagging Turns out that when they say they are indexing everything with rel=”tag” in the link code, they mean it. I asked what sorts of things this made possible and Kevin showed me how instead of just putting his Technorati Tags at the end of blog posts, he sometimes adds the rel=”tag” after the a href=”” in links mid-post. For example, when he linked to a definition in Wikipedia he made that link a tag as well. Try it out, I’m going to with this post.
  • Satire A side project Kevin is doing is Supr.c.ilio.us and the Supr.c.ilio.us blog. Mea Culpa: Kevin is collaborating on these projects with Eran Globen. It seems to be all about mocking the most absurd tendencies of the Web2.0 inner circle and related hype. It’s pretty funny, sometimes. If you’re looking for stuff like that, check it out.
  • Vertical Search If you go to Technorati proper (not tag search) you’ll see that they are not offering vertical search, or search within a subject. The categories don’t seem very differentiated and the results appear limited, but it looks like a good idea and one I’m sure they will improve. I used it just a minute ago to search for blog posts about Looksmart’s product Furl without getting results filled with random blogs that happen to use Furl for archiving. I liked that I could search inside blogs about the Web, about the Internet and about Technology (?). Unfortunately, I didn’t get many results. So we’ll see. It does seem like a helpful step towards improving blog search results. And that’s important.

So that’s one conversation I had at Tag Camp, I’ll be discussing more over the next few days. For now I have to finish up here in S.F. and get back home.

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Bookmarklet Overload? Check out Blummy

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Ok, I don’t know about anyone else but I’m dealing with a serious bookmarklet explosion. Web 2.0 is full of bookmarklets! These links you drag up to your toolbar can do amazing things, but there’s only so much room on the toolbar.

Enter Blummy. The concept is simple and brilliant. You create an account (free, I think just a user name and password if I remember correctly) and then with relative ease you can create a Super Bookmarklet. You can drag and drop from a menu of the most interesting bookmarklets other people have contributed, into a box that you size yourself. Then, you drag your Blummy bookmarklet link to your toolbar.

Ok, get ready for this: when you are bopping around the web and find a site that you want to know more about or do something with – you just click your Blummy bookmarklet and all of the sudden your personal bookmarklet box drops down with all of the bookmarklets you put into it inside. This is way cool; given the explosion of awesome services usable by one-click javascript bookmarklet the browser is going to have to change. To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if Firefox started doing something just like this soon, and then 3 years later Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will begin doing it too. But for now, I think you’ll love Blummy.

Just to give you an idea of the possibilities, here’s what I’ve got in my Blummy Box:

  • Bookmark to Del.icio.us
  • Add to Newsgator (subscribe to the RSS feed of the page you are on)
  • Furl+Del.icio.us (save in both Furl and Delicious – something I would love to do but have never been able to make work for me on any computer anywhere. Now being no exception. It doesn’t work!)
  • Furl This!
  • Check Uptime – evaluates how often a website is unavailable. I great idea, but there isn’t enough data out there yet. Or something, I have not found a single web site it finds data for yet (including msn.com) so I’m going to remove this one. I’ll just drag and drop it out of my box)
  • WayBack – awesome service of the Internet Archive that shows you what the website you are on used to look like last time their spiders indexed it. Invaluable. Great for “fixing” other peoples’ broken links, or finding things taken offline for a variety of reasons.
  • Google Who’s Linking – very nice. Search in Google to see who has linked to the site you are on. Great for discovering related content and organizations.
  • Whois – this is how you find out who owns the site you are looking at, and a variety of other information about it. I use this a couple times a week.
  • Wikipedia look-up. Great idea, looks up anything you have highlighted in your browser in Wikipedia. The version I drug and dropped doesn’t work, at least in Safari browser.
  • Gmail send, nice. Click this puppy and a pop-up window appears from your gmail account with the URL of the site you are on in the body of the email ready to send to some one. The title of the page is the subject line, and my email signature is there! This beats Furl’s email function.
  • Del.icio.us look-up. One of my favorites. I use it daily. Pops up a window with all the tags, descriptions and the users who have applied them to the site you are on in the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. Reminds you that the description field is important to fill out!! I can’t just talk about that bookmarklet without giving it to you right here: Del.lookup – try it out, you’ll love it.
  • Google What’s Similar, another search function I use often when doing promotion or outreach online. Nice that it’s available in one (or two) clicks.
  • View Scripts – nice idea, should show me any “scripts” being run on the site I’m looking at. Doesn’t work for me.

So that’s what I’ve got in my Blummy box so far! It’s also not too hard to create your own bookmarklets. I just grabbed the above from user contributed ones, many of which I had seen before.

The downside: It’s ugly. I don’t know why we aren’t allowed to tell blummy how many cells we’d like to populate and drag+drop bookmarklets into those cells, rather than the sloppy free-form space it now offers. It looks less professional than it could. But really, the functionality is so rad that I’m not losing sleep.

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Google Foil Sold on eBay

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One of my favorite search engines, Jux2.com, was just sold on eBay for the modest but comfortable sum of $110,100. Check out the auction here, it’s pretty interesting!

Jux2 performs an invaluable service by demonstrating what search results Google misses and Yahoo! or Ask.com find. You can also use it to find the “best results” those found by all three big search engines. This is great for several reasons. First, many people use Google exclusively for their web searches. Jux2 can help fill in the gaps so you don’t miss important information. Really, go try out some sample searches – Google misses some important stuff!

Second, Jux2 is good because people need to know that Google isn’t omniscient (whether it’s benevolent is another question.) Before we become so awestruck by the power of the most succesful search engine in the world and hand over every data finding function of our lives to it – it’s good to know it’s limitations. If only in a spiritual sense!

Thanks to Sid Yadiv at Rev2.org whose write up on this alerted me to the sale last night. His site is another one readers here may enjoy giving a look. He and I have been reading each others’ blogs for some time now.

Related: People interested in advancing their search capabilities may also find Soople and Xtra-Google of interest.

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