DURL, a Search Tool for del.icio.us 174
Roland Piquepaille writes "I've been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us since it started (check here for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL, written by Robin Millette, lets you type an URL and see if some other people already "delicious'ed it." And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for 'popularity contests.' But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn't have thought of, they don't compare to del.icio.us. This overview contains more comments, examples and screenshots."
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml [networksolutions.com] [networksolutions.com]). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php [clara.net]) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each mont
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
Sweet I will have to go check out this website, thanks for the link! Oh wait maybe I should read the rest of your post first....
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, a whole $647 per month! What would I possibly do with that much money. I can't even dream that big!
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:1, Offtopic)
And i do think the guy deserves some credit for finding a way to make some money off the Internet.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet each month, a hundred thousand people read the things he posts. It appears that he does serve some function. What he does is saving some people the trouble of having to search for this "interesting" stuff by themselves.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
It sounds to me like roland has a nice little side gig going on whereby he can make loads of 'extra' income just for doing what he likes to do which is read news. oh wait, that sounds like what the slashdot editors are doing too, only people actually do all the submitting FOR them... hey wait! if this roland fellow is evil, then
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Roland makes money by copy and pasting articles and then writing a few sentences about them. I have nothing against his blog. I do have something against him profiting from it.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
I can completely see where you are coming from. Yes, slashdot does something similar. But 99% of the articles that slashdot links to are original content, where the originator PROFITS (through advertisements) from the link from slashdot (or in some cases loses tons of money from the extra bandwidth, but that is bit beyond the matter at hand).
If Roland wants to provide the information that he provided, he could have submitted what he wrote on his website instead of a s
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to use the phrase "site whore", but that is essentially what he is doing. I feel the same way when anyone else uses the same dishonest tactic. There is no need for a middleman in the process when slashdot is already providing this service.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
All of this is news to me, but it seems to me that the real point is the apparent 100% acceptance rate of these articles. If there is some sort of arrangement between Slashdot and Roland, basic ethics would dictate that the connection be disclosed to readers -- like on TV News when they say "XYZ Company, which is owned by the parent company of this network, announced today..."
There is nothing wrong with posting links to articles others have written in order to generate traffic and make money, which, as you point out, both Slashdot and Roland do. But publishing a news service and selecting your news based on a financial arrangement is a little shady.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
But I've heard people talk about the rise of "freelance editors" (cherry-pick the best stories from multiple sources, add context, etc.) for a while. Maybe he's the first?
Re:THAT IS NOT EDITING! (Score:2)
I disagree that payment for content is a defining characteristic of editing.
Pick up a copy of the latest Writer's Market. There are *tons* of *print* publications that publish and edit (and sell) content submitted by writers that don't get paid -- voluntarily.
I don't want to be defending the guy -- he may be a sleazebag for all I know. If it's plaigarism or even unauthorized (but credite
Slashdot Request (Score:4, Insightful)
in the interest of keeping the discussion on Roland's stories civil, I'd like to make a Slashdot enhancement request: Could you please create a category for Roland's stories, which interested users could remove from the front page (like many people did with the Jon Katz years ago)?
If people could remove his stories, many of the whining about his stories would vanish, since they'd have a way to avoid him.
Re:Slashdot Request (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Slashdot Request (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
And many "news" websites do this too. I used to be admin in the one of the biggest portals in Finland and we had straight feed from STT, they would send article material with ftp into our servers and data would get automatically appended into the article database and show to the users..
Atleast this guy goes to the net and gathers the interesting things by himself to
I, Roland (Score:2)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
No hosting costs for you, and you perform the same job as everyone else that submits a slashdot article.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:1, Insightful)
It cant take a lot of money to get a crappy web hosting provider to host a crappy article site where all the said content is mostly copied verbatim.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
So what did you ever produce, Roland? Outside of gratuitously long quotes from original sources and adding your own snippet like "This is interesting" or "The technology has gone long ways"? What's your addition to the value chain that you're so intrigued with? If we disconnect the Internet line at your house, would you be capable of producing anything first-hand, using just word processor and your own brain?
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sure the people who originally wrote the articles you copy and pasted would say something similar to you.
That said, I refuse (and have refused in the past) to click through to your website. If someone could kindly just paste the article text from his site to
Awesome Slashdot Moderation (Score:1, Offtopic)
Not that I think that's a wrong choice. The guy could at least respond to the accuasations instead of saying "Oh, poor me, the slashdotters don't understand how hard it is...!"
Hey, screw you buddy. Some of us have real jobs.
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory Ghost in the Shell reference (Score:1, Offtopic)
Nnooooo... (Score:2, Insightful)
Doh (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing says "thanks for providing a great service" like a good post-holiday slashdotting. Note: the burning smell coming from the server room isn't fudge cooking.
Oh and I noticed they have a "most active" list of links, but no porn section???
Re:Doh (Score:1)
new name for the service (Score:2)
Re:Doh (Score:2)
I can't vouch for it's quality, but there does exist porn.a.licious [emmy-style.de]. I'm not so sure I want to see how random people on the web categorize porn, but it's there if you do.
Reminds me of... (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of... (Score:1)
After reading the headline (Score:3, Funny)
Delicious Firefox Plugin (Score:5, Informative)
DURL alternative with time-line graph (Score:2)
If you don't have a Simpy account, you can try the demo account[3].
Re:DURL alternative with time-line graph (Score:2)
Not me. The main reason del.icio.us has gotten so much attention, IMO, is the simplicity. It's a tool, it does one or two things and does them well. Oh, yeah, plus you can bring in bookmarks into any app via RSS.
As to your site... I fail to see why I would want a chart of a links popularity. But that's just me... maybe there are lots of folks who do.
BTW, you should tweak your stylesheet a bit more. The stock plone css is
Re:DURL alternative with time-line graph (Score:2)
Re:Delicious Firefox Plugin (Score:2)
Smut (Score:5, Funny)
Were has all the pr0n gone?
Re:Smut (Score:3, Funny)
Too much information! (Score:3, Funny)
Sean
Nice, fun, unreliable (Score:1)
WHADDAYAKNOW (Score:3, Funny)
sla.shdo.tted
del.icio.us In A Nutshell (Score:5, Informative)
Then later, whenever you then find a page on the 'net you like and want to "bookmark", instead of using your browser to bookmark it, you click on your link to delicious and a window pops up where you can type in a few "tags" that you think describe the page you're visiting.
What makes delicious so cool is that you don't need to make a complex hierarchy to organize your links: Instead, the program lets you slice 'em and dice 'em based on the tags: Just go to "del.icio.us/userid" and you can browse all your bookmarks.
Like Wikis, delicious is so powerful because it is so incredibly simple: For instance, typing "del.icio.us/tag/waffles" gives you a list of all sites everyone on delicious has bookmarked about waffles. This simplicity also makes it easy for others to create extensions for firefox (foxylicious) and such.
Also cool is that if you find other people who create good bookmarks you can set up to be notified when they post new stuff.
From my expereince, delicious is by far the fastest website dispersing mechanism that exists: Before the big blogs have the latest coolest links, delicious users will already know about it way beforehand, because of the excellent way it can be used to track niche interests on the web.
Re:del.icio.us In A Nutshell (Score:3, Insightful)
2) If there is a way to import existing bookmarks, this has interesting security implications. A quick search through my Firefox bookmarks yielded two URLs with username/password included as CGI vars. No website does that for anything important (I hope), these are some forum and mailing list sites, for which I use a low-value password, but people who use the same password f
Re:del.icio.us In A Nutshell (Score:2)
I don't know about importing, or the security, but come on. Don't use a high-level password for this kind of thing.
Re:del.icio.us In A Nutshell (Score:2)
Re:del.icio.us In A Nutshell (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone tried Spurl [spurl.net] or Furl [furl.net]? They seem very similar to del.icio.us. Any recommendations about which one to use?
Re:del.icio.us In A Nutshell (Score:2)
Re:this reminds me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:this reminds me (Score:1)
Oh, and mods? Offtopic? Come on!
Searching SlashDot on DURL (Score:3, Funny)
The result showed hundreds of entries for slashdot with different descriptions.
At the bottom the last entry description was like this: Community weblog - for coders and geeks. Has interesting reputation management system - "Karma". Despite crap in discussions very frequently points to interesting links.
I don't know why we have such image in other people's minds.
On the site 2004weblogawards.com, though slashdot was discussed for the weblog awards, we didn't made it.
Check the following URL and see what they are talking about: http://2004weblogawards.com/archives/000071.php
Check for the following comment: I would recommend Slashdot if they weren't so UNIX slanted, and full of idiots.
I think we (at SlashDot) should enhance our image infront of the world.
Re:Searching SlashDot on DURL (Score:1)
Re:Searching SlashDot on DURL (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's the image that is the problem. Slashdot really is predominantly a load of crap packed with idiots who think they're God's gift to computers. There is occasionally a link to some other side which is actually interesting, but it's getting more and more rare.
Re:Searching SlashDot on DURL (Score:2)
If the rest of the world think you're raving lunatics, you ain't got an image problem, you got a 'too many raving lunatics'-problem.
Article Text = no $$ for roland!!! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us [del.icio.us] since it started (check here [primidi.com] for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL [waglo.com], written by Robin Millette [waglo.com], lets you type an URL and see if some other people already "delicious'ed it." And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for 'popularity contests.' But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn't have thought of, they don't compare to del.icio.us. Read more for lots of examples...
As I'm not sure if I convinced you, let's start with a real blog, Smart Mobs [smartmobs.com].
If I feed the URL http://www.smartmobs.com/ [smartmobs.com] to Bloglines [bloglines.com] by submitting the search string "http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www .smartmobs.com/&submit=Search,"
I receive 3358 unsorted results.
If I do the same with Technorati [technorati.com], I find 1,614 links from 1,234 sources, sorted by date.
In both cases, this produces a number of references which is hard to browse. Why a particular site has quoted Smart Mobs? It's not obvious to find an answer.
So, it's time to use DURL, which returns a more manageable number of 45 results from del.icio.us.
http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_1.jpg
Here is a screen capture of the page returned by DURL. You can see that some people are reading Smart Mobs because they associated it with the concepts of "creativity" or "ubiquitous computing". Others are using tags such as "collaboration," "mobile" or "community." (Credit: Robin Millette/del.icio.us).
Let's check for example the tag "Social Software."
http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_2.jpg
It brings us to del.icio.us/hbryant/social_software [del.icio.us]. (Credit: del.icio.us). Wow! Exciting! New tools for del.icio.us! Let's visit Soooo del.icio.us people can't stand it! [weblogsinc.com].
In a summary, with only two clicks, I found a gold mine. Do you know another service which is that efficient?
Now, let's return to the previous page and check the link to the "community" tag.
http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_3.jpg
This time, this leads us to del.icio.us/oubiwann/community [del.icio.us]. (Credit: del.icio.us). From there, I can now read a "definition of Mundialization" or discover what is the "World Government of World Citizens."
The more I use del.icio.us, the more I like it. This doesn't mean I'm not using Bloglines or Technorati, but I'm using them for 'exhaustivity,' not for 'discovery.'
[And here is an additional note for Robin Millette, the author of DURL. In fact, you can do the same search on del.icio.us by adding the string "http://del.icio.us/url?url=" (without the quotes) before the URL you want to see if it has been delicioused. But it might be too geeky for some of you.]
Source: Robin Millette, December 20, 2004; and various websites
MemeStreams does this... (Score:1)
I run a small internet community called MemeStreams [memestreams.net] that has had a feature like this for some time. MemeStreams has a thread bookmarklet. [memestreams.net] You can click on it when viewing any URL and see a discussion thread
I had this idea a while back (Score:1)
ascendtopresident
Everyone is rated on their forum postings on news articles like hot or not.
Everyone can click their own personal bias: such as rep/dem, con/lib, prolife/prochoice. And the highest ranking of them will ascend to the top, so you can read the top people's comments on news articles. Being on the top will encourage people to spend more time on their responses too.
spurl (Score:2, Informative)
Actually I found spurl's interface best of its kind, and it has really nice browser workarounds to get you ready to spurl easy and fast. Even a spurl firefox extension [mozdev.org] is out. Spurl has a plugin for IE as well.
other services also.. (Score:2)
http://historyagent.com/
Has firefox extensions, and HTML segment (images/formatting etc) commenting via selection. You just select a portion of the page, including images, to use as the comment and hit the bookmarklet and it is added.
Also I wanted more feeds possible, for examples see: http://feeds.historyagent.com/joeldg/
Anyway, just wanted to point out that del is no the only alternative out there.
DURL is redunadant (Score:3, Informative)
http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://www.myurl.com/
it would be trivial to create a javascript bookmarklet to do just that.
Re:DURL is redunadant (Score:2)
Re:DURL is redunadant (Score:1)
Re:DURL is redunadant (Score:1)
javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/ur
it works.
I had to do this search (Score:2)
everybody loves Roland - OTT moderation (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, there are a lot [slashdot.org] of [slashdot.org] insightful [slashdot.org] replies [slashdot.org] - all of which dropped like a stone from 3/4/5 insightful to 0/1 insightful in the space of two minutes.
In my mind this leaves two options:
Y'know, I used to respect the anarchy of Slashdot. Now, I don't think there's any way we can trust the objectivity of the editors a bit.
Or am I really the only one here who think's Roland is a plagiarizing c*nt?
cLive ;-)
Off-line alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Off-line alternative? (Score:1)
One step towards that would be implementing import/ export options of popular bookmark file formats.
But wait, here's another idea -- wouldn't it be great if we could keyword search our bookmarked pages? They should run Gatherers on the bookmark files (Anyone remember the "Harvest" system?).
So, if anyone has some process cycles to spare, and an online Linux server, email me -- I'd be willing to try and set up indexers that build separate indexes for each bookmark file. exsched@r-emove.yahoo
del.icio.us spam? (Score:1)
Simpy: Link History with a time graph (Score:2)
[1] Simpy [simpy.com]
[2] Link History bookmarklet [simpy.com]
[3] demo/demo [simpy.com]
Why slashdot the tool? (Score:1)
Re:Why slashdot the tool? (Score:2)
Delicious SPAM potential. (Score:1)
Best to have a Deli' account that is different from the one used for email services... I can easily see Spam mail originating from these sorts of lookups.
del.icio.us vs. furl (Score:1)
Hyperlinkomatic (Score:1)
Check out furl.net (Score:2)
Furl.net [furl.net]
Re:Del.icio.us (Score:3, Funny)
You should try hostname v. It'll give you the version of the hostname utility. No really, you should try it!
Regards,
Clever (Score:2)
Re:The Speculative Search Game: Another Approach (Score:1)
However, the Speculative Search Game allows you to make predictions about any web page -- not just blogs. Moreover, The Speculative Search Game has a much simpler model than BlogShares and most other artificial game markets -- and perhaps this would encourage more people to play.
The Speculative Search Engine is not available yet, but will be if/when the game attracts many players and generates some interesting data.