Posts tagged as “showcase”
Hi, everyone:
As I mentioned in my previous posts, I wanted to feature some of your great user stories on our blog. Congratulations to Gemma Holm, our first Delicious guest blogger. We are always open to your suggestions for topics for future blog posts, so don’t be shy.
A teacher’s Delicious inspiration
By Gemma Holm
Like many of my friends, I use Yahoo! Groups to participate in current conversations about pop culture, healthy relationships, and recipes. As a teacher, I also take pride in posting kind responses to anguished questions posted by teenagers on Yahoo! Answers. Recently, after reading about Delicious on the Yahoo! Groups blog, I decided to check it out. Wow! Parents, teachers, tutors, and librarians take note: Delicious can be a wonderful tool for student learning.
At the start of class, I usually distribute a list of favorite websites to my students, but it is always incomplete. This year, I’m planning to use Delicious with students in my classes to collaboratively select, bookmark, tag, and describe websites that seem especially helpful and relevant.
I’d like my class to explore ways to use a group Delicious account to support student success. In our class discussions, students can critically consider which websites we should add, and which to leave out. Considering what to include provides an authentic opportunity to talk about website credibility and sources. Additionally, it makes more of our class research accessible to students and their families outside of class.
My students already work in groups. This year, these teams will research relevant websites, and nominate them for our class Delicious page. As students conduct research and sift through options, they will be engaged in a learning process. Our class discussions provide opportunity for collaboration and debate. I look forward to the first suggestion that we include Wikipedia.com, so that we can have an in-depth examination of benefits and possible pitfalls of crowdsourced material for research and writing. I eagerly await the day that a group nominates a website of its own making.
Tagging our Delicious websites will help us to form a common vocabulary that can enhance discussions, research, and student writing. Nominating and considering tags can provide a great lead-in to discussing electronic research methods. I aim to help my students gain a new appreciation for tags, keywords, and subject searches.
There are also a few different ways we can use tag descriptions. One would be to include a brief summary of the homework assignment that capitalizes on a group links. Another would be to create enhanced descriptions of our links so that classes from another state or country would understand the focus and limits of our research. Next year, I hope to collaborate with another instructor and class in another state or another country that is studying a similar topic, and to share our Delicious links.
This year, when my students sit down to write, meet with a tutor, or study for a test, they will be able to visit our Delicious page and access our online class resources . Parents, tutors, and other helpers will have one more tool to support student learning. I can’t wait for school to start.
Guest blogger Gemma Holm teaches writing and study skills in Pittsburgh, PA.
August 11th, 2010
Now that we’ve gotten some housework out of the way, we’ve been able to spend the first few weeks of 2010 finishing off some new features and correcting some long term annoyances. We think you’ll enjoy these, a lot!
Bookmark Display options
The Delicious bookmark display options were spread all over the page and subsequently there was more than one place to control how you view your content. So we combined them all and placed them to the right of the Tagbar, just beneath the bookmark count.
Privacy filter: This has been requested so many times and unfortunately put on the back burner in place of other features. We figured it was time for it to finally hit the streets. You can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public.
Send recipients: (display of for:, @twitter & email addresses): The community is clearly divided on whether or not they want this information displayed or not, so we decided to give you the ability to ‘show’ or ‘hide’ that information. If you don’t want to see the history of who you’ve sent bookmarks to, you can hide them.
Open bookmarks in: Something else that both you and the Delicious team have been divided on. Should bookmarks open in the same window or a new tab? Well, we thought we’d let you decide want you want to do.
Tag options
Somewhat related to Bookmark Options, we also moved the ‘Tag Options’ out of the blue action box and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed. Here you get the same functionality as before, it’s just closer to the tags.
Browse these bookmarks
We’ve created a new feature that saves you the trouble of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row.
Click the new link in the action in the upper right hand corner of a users page to see it in action
The feature opens the first bookmark and displays a small frame at the top of the page. From here you can paginate forwards through the bookmarks.
We’re still working on the feature and more functionality will be added over the coming months, but based on how useful we’ve found it, we wanted to give you a chance to start using it sooner rather than later. We’d love to get your feedback on this feature and suggestions for other features. We know what we want to add to it, but your responses will help us gauge what we should work on adding next.
Beyond these features we’ve improved the tag management functionality on our mobile site and while you might not notice the changes, we also fixed 50+ other minor bugs here and there.
What next?
There are a few long outstanding pet peeves that we want to get addressed before we tackle some of the larger projects planned for 2010. There will also be some more tweaks to current functionality that give better access to the great content we all help generate everyday, not to mention the ability to look up and connect to other friends that use Delicious. All of this we hope to give you before the end of March, plus a few other benefits we know you’ll love, but can’t spill the beans on just yet.
Keep bookmarking!
Simon
January 28th, 2010
At the SIGIR 2009 conference, we had the great fortune of learning about a new academic research project that aims to discover the top authoritative users and links in social networking services like delicious. We were so impressed by the work and its wide array of applications that we asked the researchers to write a guest post here describing their findings. — Vik Singh
By Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung
A major problem of the Internet today is that finding high quality information is not easy nor fast. The steady increase of spam and junk content on the Web further complicates this challenge. Another related issue is that finding knowledgeable and trustworthy users on social platforms like Delicious is much more difficult than it should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if Delicious recommended “good†users with similar interests? Or wouldn’t it be helpful if you could get a selection of great websites on jewelry or mortgage without being overwhelmed by spam?
To tackle this problem, we created the SPEAR algorithm. SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious. In the case of the latter, this means analyzing the timeline of the bookmarking and tagging activities of users. The focus of SPEAR is on the ability of users to find new, high quality information on the Internet. A great benefit of SPEAR is that it returns two very useful sets of results: first, a list of users ranked by their expertise; and second, a list of websites ranked by their quality. So, whether you are looking for experts on Delicious for the programming language JavaScript or want to find the best websites on photography, SPEAR can help.
On top of that, the algorithm has been shown to be very resistant to spamming attacks. We tested the SPEAR algorithm using data from Delicious – over 71,000 Web documents, 0.5 million users, and 2 million shared bookmarks. We set the algorithm to find JavaScript experts, for example, and it produced a list of users; the top two were professional software developers, and not a single spammer was ranked in the Top 200.
Technically, SPEAR is based on the well-known information retrieval algorithm HITS, a technique presented in 1999 that is used by search engines to rank Web pages. We came up with SPEAR by modifying HITS so that it fits to the characteristics of open and shared systems like Delicious and extended it with a new component that integrates the timeline of user activities into its analysis. This resulted in further performance improvements of the algorithm (refer to Figure 1 below).
The two main elements of the new SPEAR algorithm are:
1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user’s expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.
2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers – they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents. In other words, “the early bird catches the worm” (see also Figure 1). SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.
The combination of both these elements has the effect that SPEAR favors quality over quantity of user actions, and that the algorithm is quite resistant to today’s spamming attacks.
We believe SPEAR is very useful in the context of open systems, particularly, social networks. That said, we are already researching the next version of the algorithm – the popularity of online services like Delicious is rising, and so is the spam threat. Whether we want to improve the user experience on Delicious or win the arms race against spammers, there’s still a lot of work left to do!
Figure 1: The SPEAR algorithm gives more credit to early discoverers of new information. How much credit each user receives depends on a so-called credit score function, which is supplied as a parameter to the algorithm.
Figure 2: The main technical components of the actual SPEAR algorithm are a weighted adjacency matrix and two score vectors. The vectors keep track of the expertise score of users and quality scores of documents, respectively.
About Michael Noll
Michael is a researcher and bi-national Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany, and the University of Luxembourg. His research interests are mainly within the fields of the Social Web, information retrieval and information security. He enjoys tackling difficult problems and solving them in practice, particularly with free and open source software.
About Albert Au Yeung
Albert is originally from Hong Kong, and is now a final year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. His PhD research project focuses on how implicit semantics and qualities of entities on the Web can be uncovered by analyzing the collective user behaviors on social Websites such as collaborative tagging systems. His research interests also include online social network analysis and linked data on the Semantic Web.
Related Links
SPEAR homepage, http://www.spear-algorithm.org/
Michael G. Noll, http://www.michael-noll.com/
Ching-man Au Yeung, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~cmay06r/
“A Better Way to Rank Expertise Onlineâ€, Technology Review, 07/09, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23100/
August 31st, 2009
Greetings all and Happy New Year! (is it too late to say that now?) We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.
In the meantime, given this is the week of Macworld we thought you’d be interested in this Quick Tip on how to use Delicious on your iPhone.
Huge thanks to Tom Merritt at CNET who created this video and let us post it here. We hope this is a useful tool for all of you current and future iPhone users!
Â
Chris Kim
Marketing Manager
January 17th, 2008
One of the many great things about working on del.icio.us is hearing from people who really grok what we do and why we’re doing it. This enthusiasm takes many forms, and we’ve definitely been blown away by interest in our preview as well as the overwhelming response for our old swag.
It’s all great, and it’s extra-great when someone creates something that’s extra-special. For all of you who struggle to explain Social Bookmarking to your family and friends, there’s now an awesome video for you:
Many thanks to Lee and Sachi Lefever at Common Craft for their efforts here. So, next time you’re trying to explaining why this “Social Bookmarking” thing is all the rage, you now know what video to play.
Nick Nguyen
Product Manager
September 24th, 2007
Adobe Illustrator is one of my favorite design tools, and as part of the redesign of del.icio.us I’ve been using it in a number of interesting ways. For example, I’ve written JavaScript code to pull in and parse del.icio.us RSS feeds then automatically render my latest designs in Illustrator using real data. This allows us to rapidly iterate on the design well before anyone has to write any real code.
So I was very interested when the Adobe Illustrator team came to visit us a few months ago. It turns out that Illustrator users are constantly making excellent online descriptions of their tips, techniques, and tutorials, and Adobe wanted a good way to collect and share these with other users online and within Illustrator. So why not use del.icio.us?
Adobe’s first step was to set up a del.icio.us account and start collecting the best bookmarks on Illustrator they could find. They then integrated del.icio.us into Illustrator CS3 as part of their “knowhow†palette, thereby allowing users to tap directly into Adobe’s bookmarks.
To try it out within Illustrator CS3, select the “Window†menu then “Adobe Labs†> “knowhowâ€. From the “knowhow†panel you can see contextual help for the tool you are using and search the Internet for more help. You will then notice that one of the tabs has the del.icio.us logo on it, which points you to the bookmarks Adobe has collected. Alternatively, if you don’t have CS3, you can also try out the “knowhow†palette on Adobe Labs or http://knowhow.adobe.com or of course you can always see all their bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/knowhow.
If you have found or have created any Web pages that you think other Illustrator users would find useful, simply tag them “for:knowhow†and the Adobe team will review and add them to their collection for all Illustrator users to enjoy.
May 30th, 2007
Johnvey Huang‘s awesome Delicious Director is a high speed bookmark viewer for del.icio.us. Reminiscent of the Smalltalk browsers of old, it is implemented entirely in Javascript and runs entirely within the browser.
July 11th, 2005
Previous Posts
