Update: I've added a question on Quora about this too - feel free to contribute your story there.
In my last post, I talked a bit about the notion of Delicious being a platform with a myriad of uses, and I've been actively wondering about this since then. Upon further reflection, I've realized that the best way to figure this out is actually to engage and ask people directly.
Accordingly, I'm asking for your help. Of course it's upsetting that Delicious is being sunsetted, but other than individual users and Archive Team, people seem to be doing very little about it. Delicious is clearly more than the bookmarks. I want to gather information about how people like you and me actually used it beyond it's obvious functionality. Did you use it to manage resources for your dissertation? Did you use it to communicate with family about a serious event or illness? How did you go beyond the boundaries of it being just "
ArchivesNext recently inquired about how archivists measure success of 2.0 initiatives. It's hard to determine some 2.0-ish initiatives will really impact statistics when you don't really define what the results you're trying to see. I'd like to open the question further — how do we begin developing metrics for things that sit on the cusp between forms of outreach? Furthermore, I'm curious to see where this information is captured — do archivists wait until the end to gather survey data, or if they working towards something like we at NYPL Labs are doing with Infomaki, our new usability tool developed by Michael Lascarides, our user analyst.
Made by Twittersheep, a new project made (in part) by my acquaintance Ted Roden, a creative technologist for New York Times Research & Development.
You'd think there was some sort of tried and true script for Delicious users to repost bookmarks from their inboxes into their accounts, especially given that there are often shared accounts where multiple people will tag things as "for:foo" to have them show up on foo's Delicious account. Well, there wasn't, until now (at least as far as I could tell).
Enter deliciouscopy. It uses pydelicious, as well as the Universal Feed Parser and simplejson. It reads a user's inbox, checks to see if poster of the for:whomever tag was added to your network, and reposts accordingly, adding a via: tag for attribution. It even does some dead simple logging if you need that sort of thing. The code's all there, and GPL license blah blah blah. I hacked this together in about an hour for something at MPOW - namely to repost things to our shared account. It's based on Michael Noll's deliciousmonitor.py but diverges from it fairly quickly. Enjoy, and give any feedback if you must.
I just discovered DataPortability.org through Peter Van Garderen's blog post about it. I was entirely surprised that I'd heard nary a peep about it. Some basic examination (running a WHOIS query on the domain) shows that it's still a fairly new project. I have to say, though, that I'm entirely impressed. Those involved have given a whole lot of thought to how they're going to be doing things, as evidenced by those who have signed up to be involved and the DataPortability Charter. To wit, the Charter's principles tend to speak for themselves:
We want sovereignty over the profiles, relationships, content and media we create and maintain. We want open formats, protocols and policies for identity discovery, data import, export and sync. We want to protect user rights and privacy. And, of course, the thing that made me squeal with delight like a pig in mud:
4. DataPortability will not inventing any new standards.
I mean, that's probably the best news that someone like me could get.
Many of Web 2.0's detractors argue about it's real value, but given the wildfires in Southern California, I was happy to see it really put to good use. KPBS, a San Diego radio station, has been using Flickr and, even more shocking (at least for some), Twitter as ways to disseminate information and news quickly. The use of Twitter is particularly interesting as it can send out SMS messages. You might recall a few years ago when protesters in the Philippines used SMS to organize political rallies and warn of police retaliation. The California State Library Blog also has provided information from the California State Archivist about archives affected by the fires. In addition, information about disaster recovery for libraries and archives is available both on a regional level by the San Diego/Imperial County Libraries Disaster Response Network and on the state level by the California Preservation Program. Please hold those affected by the fires in your thoughts, and if you can, contact SILDRN or the CPP to help.
