The URL page, as it is now offers the complete tag clud for a given time. And regardless of what Joshua seems to think many of us would agree that this does convey a lot of information that we are somehow, often unconsciously, able to perceive. There are plenty of work that has been done on the subject by psycologist, sociologist, and people in the advertisment industries. We do perceive those tags, although we are often unable to scan them all consciously.
I would like to point out, again, something about the info for academic and for other services down the road. Although delicious now gives all the info on the URL page about the current situation (thanks), and the historical info divided by month, it has really lost the day to day historical information. That information WAS VERY important. It is also because of that information that I was able, thanks to tagcloud, to point out the little social quake that you can see in the following picture: http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/images/tagclouds-little-quake.jpg Now I think I understood what that social quake was due to. Mystery, mystery :). But to actually measure if I am right, and zoom on it, and show it, and explain it, I would really need to be able to get the complete historical data. Right now even the picture above could not be reproduced any more, as such graph would only have 5 buckets on the x axis (one per month). Absolutely not enough for any serious study. Social changes now happen on a day to day basis in our society. And that quake only lasted few days, maybe as less as three. Of course Yahoo could say that important studies could be done, provided people register a partnership with Yahoo itself. This might be a solution, but it would de facto kill the amatorial ecology that is using delicious data to try different things and reporting on their blog. The people who, in one night, try and discover different things, following a sudden ispiration. Well, those people are often the ones who make the biggest discoveries. Maybe a meeting point could be found in yahoo offering some extra API for developers, after registering them. Like ebay does. It all depends on how hard or automatised, the registration process would be. What would be Yahoo's requirement on it. If yahoo is not interested in offering this info (or does not see its value, which seems more the case, at least officially) and is not interested in taking responsability to be the source on the web for this information freely, we should be told. Directly, and bluntly. Joshua, please, can you enlighten us on that? It is important. Other's people decision depend on that. If Yahoo is not, I think a separate project should be called for. A sort of meta-aggregator, owned by some free foundation which could not be sold. A service which could receive the xml files from the users in delicious, furl, simpy, ..., combine them and offer them back through an url based way for academic uses and other services. Any thoughts on that? Any official answer from Yahoo? Many thanks for reading it, have a good week Pietro --- Joshua Schachter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am merely unconvinced that people are able to get > value out of a giant > blob of text. > > I do see that it's a possible venue for discovery > for following links, > but I think the potential value of the general view > is diminished by the > enormous pile. > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
