Marktopia

For those of you subscribed to my del.icio.us feed, I apologize for two reasons.  First off, I apologize because there has been no activity on it for months and months.  Second, I apologize because you got bombarded with a bunch of stuff today.  All of this was due to my new organization for bookmarks and stuff to read.  I had been gathering links all over the place, Firefox, NetNewsWire’s flagged items, old del.icio.us links, etc.   This made it difficult to figure out where stuff was and what I had read already.  I decided to put everything together on del.icio.us now.  Stuff I have read and want bookmarked will get thrown up there for everyone to see and stuff I have not have had a chance to read yet will get the clever toread tag on it.  If you are curious about stuff I am reading or going to read, feel free to follow them.

I originally sent this to the HDJunk mail list here at work, but I thought it was good enough to be a blog post as well, so here goes:

As some of you may know, del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo on Friday. This may or may not mean anything to you depending on your interest in the Web 2.0 phenomenon, however in an effort to expand tech knowledge, I have decided to try and explain what this del.icio.us is and why you might use it. (more…)

As you may have noticed on the front of the page, I have added a cloud of all tags used in my blog posts. I went through all of my old posts and added tags to them all after removing their categories. I like the tagging of posts better than the categories since it makes it a little more versitile. These tags are also used for the Technorati service that monitors lots and lots of blogs. I also added more permanent links underneath my del.icio.us links for pages that have linked to Marktopia. If you have a link to Marktopia and it is not listed there, please let me know and I can put your link on there. All of these are in trying to tie into more and more of these social web services that are available now. While it is a bit of the trendy thing to do right now, things like the del.icio.us inbox can be quite addictive. After going through all of my blog posts, I can say that things will likely change in the future, but for now, Marktopia is pretty much where I want it.

As you may have noticed, a couple of recipes have been added to my del.icio.us listing. I have signed up to a couple of RSS feeds for recipes and to keep track of ones that sound good, I am adding them to del.icio.us under the recipe tag. I doubt that I will “review” them per se, but if one isn’t so hot, you will likely see it removed from the list. Just another attempt to make technology work for me!

With all of the new web tech stuff that I have been looking at recently, another one has popped up on my radar called Flock. This is basically a version of Firefox that has been tweaked and added onto to somewhat integrate with social web services, such as del.icio.us and Flickr. My initial thoughts are, even if I didn’t use any of the other features it would still be worth a look since it definately makes some improvements to the Firefox UI. But that wouldn’t be too much fun to not investigate these social features, so here is a rundown of some of them that I have tried.

• Blog PostingThis post is actually being written from within Flock’s blog posting feature. It has all of the comforts of WordPress, however I do not have to load a different page. It also lets me take advantage of the Shelf. This is a clipboard sort of thing where you can store images and text, then drag them into the blog post and have Flock correctly make the links to the appropriate pictures. It also has a Topbar that lets you navigate through past posts to edit or view and add Flickr pictures based on a user or keyword. One note, the bulleted list feature isn’t perfect.
• CollectionsThere are so many things to go over here, I can’t go over them all. Basically if you have a del.icio.us account, you can integrate your web browser favorites with those and then tag up your web browser favorites as well. You can then organize these into collections to keep them organized. Flock will also look for any feeds within those bookmarks and give you an RSS aggragation look. There is actually a lot more there and I am still exploring these features. The one thing with the RSS view is that it does not like directly to the entry, just to the main page for the site.
• Other FeaturesFirst off, there is a built-in search of your Favorites and History that is a feature that I love. This by itself makes me want to keep using this. The Shelf is also pretty sweet for keeping track of things to add into your blog. I also like the drop down list of collections which allows you to navigate the sites in each collection easily.

Overall I think the concept is pretty cool. I will keep using this for a bit, so any other major things will be added to the post. If anyone else is trying this program out, I would love to hear feedback from you as well.