Last week, while catching up on podcasts, I listened to Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?, Jason Schwartz's presentation from SXSW Interactive 2007 (View his slideshow). Jason crammed a lot of interesting ideas into his 25 minute presentation (to which you should listen), but his references to de.licio.us, similicio.us and Technorati got me thinking about what a tremendous resource de.licio.us can be.

In addition to being a good place to share bookmarks and find sites in your areas of interest, de.licio.us can also provide some interesting information about your own site(s), specifically:

• Who has bookmarked your site?
• When did they bookmark the site?
• What tags have been used for your site?
• What other sites share those tags?
• What tags are related to those tags?

This information intrigues me because it offers new opportunities for networking and search engine optimization.

Networking through de.licio.us

Given that de.licio.us includes a networking component, it's pretty obvious that we should look at the pages of those who bookmark our sites to see what else we have in common. If one of these people has bookmarked sites related to our topic, then we may want to add that person to our network.

Additionally, their bookmarks can lead us to sites that compete with our own (that we should follow) as well as sites that complement our own. If some of these sites are blogs, we can comment on them and begin to network with their authors and readers to share knowledge and draw traffic to our own sites. We may also want to follow/friend such people on social media services such as Pownce, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and the place where we began, de.licio.us.

de.licio.us tags can inform key word choices for SEO

If we've thought carefully about our topic and pay attention to our analytics we should have a good idea regarding the key words and phrases users choose when searching for our content.

When people search for a topic, they usually search for word combinations they expect to find on the type of site they are seeking. If they're detail oriented they'll try to fine tune these in such a way that they can narrow the results to very specific types of sites.

But when people tag a site they've bookmarked, they tag it with the word combinations they associate with the content—the words they'll be most likely to remember 6 months from now when they're trying to find the site they bookmarked on polymers that can change from hard to soft. They might search for the site using "hard soft polymer change" and tag it the same way, but they may also tag it under: polymerresearch, neuroscience, seacucumber, science, chemoresponsive, mechanicadaptability, casewesternreserveuniversity, macromolecular and so forth.

Some of these tags might be obvious or redundant, but others might give us some ideas for more key words we should include on our site.

Example: Putting the Web Development Blog under the de.licio.us microscope

If we look at the de.licio.us results for the Web Development blog, we'll see that 20 people have bookmarked it. That won't give us as much data as we'd find for a higher profile site, but it will still give us some interesting information.

The first thing we'll notice is that the most popular tags are: CSS, blog, development, web, webdesign, webdevelopment. That's not a big surprise; we know those terms already occur multiple times throughout the blog.

If we look below that we'll see the posting history. This lists, in reverse chronological order, the users who have bookmarked the page, the year and month they bookmarked it and the tags they used.

User Tags

Looking at these tags I see a few that vary from the Web focus, including: highered, uni_blogs, uni_webdev, ublog and academiccomputing. This is useful because while I may think of the Web as the primary theme of this blog, others are associating it with higher education and academia. Since they are classifying it in this manner, it may mean that others might be looking for blogs on such topics. Thus it might behoove me to include phrases like "college blog," "university blog," "academic computing," and "blogging in education" somewhere relevant within the site. If I add such terms this month I can check back over the coming months to see if they start appearing in my site analytics. While my writing on the topic automatically includes them in this blog entry, I'll also consider whether some are appropriate to my About Us page.

Bookmarking dates

Having pondered my keywords, I'm now curious about the dates the site was bookmarked. The dates could be meaningless—just random times when visitors found the site—but they could also indicate that certain entries sparked enough interest (at the time they were published) that someone felt it worthwhile to bookmark them for future reference. Nothing particularly exciting stands out for November 2005, but November 2006 includes the article, A writer's obligations: ethics, law and pragmatism, Part 3: Pragmatism, which my stats have shown to be one of the more popular entries on the blog. This may just be coincidental, but if you have a larger site that has been bookmarked more often than mine you may be able to find some more obvious patterns.

Bookmarking users

Finally let's look at the people who have bookmarked the page. Some of the names are familiar, they're people I either know in person or online. But others are unfamiliar. If I know them, I don't know them by their usernames. I don't recognize sandpetra, but he/she's tagged the blog as "clink." I'm not quite sure what that means, but when I go to his/her page I see that he/she has a lot of sites tagged under accessibility, accessiblewebsitedesign, webdesign, seo and other topics that interest me. Seeing this I've added sandpetra to my de.licio.us network. A Google search on the name tells me that sandpetra is the Web Marketing Director for Hobo-Web Ltd UK an SEO and design firm near Glasgow in Scotland. Hobo-Web also produces a well-written blog called Hobo News, to which I will now subscribe. (Check out their post, Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments?) See, this connection has already proved useful—it provides content I think you would enjoy reading.

Conclusion: de.licio.us is useful in many ways.

If you're not already using de.licio.us as a bookmarking tool, I hope I've given you a few more reasons to do so. And if you're not sure what to bookmark first, feel free to start with this blog as well as this entry!

de.licio.us (and related) resources

• Common Craft’s Plain English Video Series
• similicio.us
• Social Survey: Del.icio.us
• The Del.icio.us Lesson
• Wikipedia: del.icio.us

As many of you know, I have something of a podcast addiction. My iPod contains everything from the video mischief of Mr. Deity to the probing intellectual discussions of In Our Time—which returns from summer hiatus this week. I listen to these while walking about campus, driving around town or when trying to fall asleep at night. Alas some of these podcasts are ill-suited to the fight against insomnia. Instead of lulling me into slumber, they taunt me with ideas that I want to tinker with right away. One such Podcast is Boagworld, "the podcast for those involved in designing, developing and running Web sites."

Boagworld is the creation of Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington, co-founders (along with Chris Scott) of Headscape, a Web design firm in the U. K. According to their Web site, "Boagworld.com aims to educate you about the latest web innovations, teach you how to manage the development of your site and show you how to integrate your site into your broader business. Most of all it aims to put you in a position where you are not baffled by the techies who are building your site!"

Why you should listen to Boagworld

Two things struck me the first time I listened to Boagworld. 1) They're quite entertaining, and 2) They really know what they are talking about. As soon as I heard them referring to such tried and true resources as A List Apart and Case alumnus, Eric Meyer, I knew they were on the right track. A visit to their well-organized, standards-compliant site served to confirm that they practice what they preach.

The podcasts cover a nice cross-section of topics aimed towards designers, developers, marketers and anyone else who is involved in some aspect of an organizations Web presence. As the mission statements says, "This site/podcast exists to help you poor sods who have been lumbered with the job of managing the company's website. This responsibility is on top of your normal work and has been given to you despite the fact that you know little or nothing about the internet and building websites. It is for you that boagworld.com exists." (I told you they were entertaining.) Shows are 50-60 minutes in length and typically feature:

• Light hearted banter between Paul and Marcus as they share the week's Web-related news, tips, advice and recommendations
• Marcus's Bit, typically focusing on an issue related to Web project/client management or marketing
• Paul's Corner, covering a design or development subject, and
• Interviews with various experts, such as Patrick McNeil from Design Meltdown and Daniel Burka, the creative director at digg.com and/or book reviews

The order of the above may vary, but each week they cover a wide range of material on everything from css to social media.

Why you should read Boagworld

One of the problems with audio podcasts is keeping track of the names, links, books and other details mentioned throughout the show. This is not a problem with Boagworld as the accompanying Web site and blog includes summaries and/or transcripts of the shows including links to everything mentioned within. Rather than having to listen with pencil and paper at the ready, you can simply relax with the audio then go to the site later to follow-up on their recommendations. Archives are organized by date and subject as well as tagged by keyword, making the information easily accessible even if you can't remember which episode featured what. The blog allows listeners to leave comments about the shows and the site also features a discussion board for further interaction with the hosts and other Web developers around the world.

Why are you still reading this? Go give it a listen!

At this point in this entry I could prattle on with various details and examples, but as I'm recommending that you listen to Boagworld, perhaps it is time that I let you do just that.

I've come across a beta version of a new search portal/appliance called hakia, which states that they are "building the Web's new "meaning-based" search engine" in hopes of improving search efficiency. One of their taglines is "You should never search after searching."

The idea is to be able to type in complete sentences similar to what one might enter into 'ask.com' (previously Ask Jeeves) and get results that are presorted in to categories or "galleries". This is an overview from their site:

"Meaningful Categorization of Search Results (Galleries):
For short queries such as cancer or Winston Churchill, hakia presents search results in a categorized format to provide meaningful variations of the subject. Each gallery has 10 categories on the average, that is equal to running 10 queries in conventional search engines.

Highlighting Best Sentences:
For complex and longer queries, hakia highlights relevant sentences that best corresponds to the meaning match of your query. Try Why did Enron collapse? You do not have to open the documents to see the quality of the results - a key to saving your time!

Complete Text Snippets:
hakia often displays uninterrupted sections of Web pages in search results that provide a full point of view of the content. Presenting complete snippets enables you to evaluate instantly the search results and saves you significant search time.

Now, I know what you're thinking; "Come on Kevin, no search engine can beat Google!" Well maybe not, but I decided to give it a try. I entered [How many students are there at Case Western Reserve University?] and found this snippet of text, fourth down in the results:
"Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a research-oriented institution with more than 9500 students (more than half of which are graduate students)." Clicking on this link led me to: http://www.answers.com/topic/case-western-reserve-university , which provided me with... well, more than simply information on our student body.

Of course, I could have found that page with Google, MSN, Yahoo, or any number of currently available search engines. It's worth noting however, that I probably wouldn't have found it that high in the results, or been provided with the information without even clicking further.

I thought I'd give it another try and searched for two of my favorite jazz trumpet players. Entering simply their names, Chet Baker and Miles Davis (no quotes necessary) gave me just about the best pages of results I've ever seen, or could imagine. It returned a different data set than Google or Yahoo, and just may provide an alternative for academic researchers. Try it yourself and let me know what you think.

For what it's worth, they plan to launch this site officially sometime in 2007. Watch for it.