Library clips

Lazy Sheep is an automatic tagging bookmarklet for del.icio.us.

Firstly customise the bookmarklet to your needs and save it to your links bar.

Click the bookmarklet when you are on a page, and you won’t even notice it has been recorded into your del.icio.us account (according to the specs you customised).

Go to your del.icio.us account to see the new entry with automated tags (magic).

Some people think it isn’t a good idea…leads to generic or homogeneous “dominant tags”, reducing the longtail…I guess lazy!

There is a fine line concerning effectiveness, between convenience, automation, and laziness…it is essential to analyse and evaluate how this convenience contributes or what it takes away from the social alchemy that is del.icio.us.

From this insightful post:

“When I note that this article is about “tagging” and “cognition”, I am explicitly informing myself that I am currently interested in “tagging” and “cognition”. So the process helps me keeps my bookmarks, and tells me a little about myself everytime.

At the social level, the moment I post to del.icio.us, I can see if there are others who are interested in the same article. If so, did they use the same tags? I can see how others think similarly and differently, and also see the long tail of idiosyncratic tags.”

revalicious allows visual representation of your tag set for del.icio.us users (login)

Comes in 3 parts:

spacenav

For starters it tells me I have 57 tags used in 1390 posts.

Hover over a tag and it will tell you % used in your account and related to % of tags
eg. km used for 3, related to 10% of tags

If you click on the tag it will become a circle in the middle of your page
…the size of the tags depends on the number of bookmarks it holds.

Drag the tag to a catcher on the bottom of the page, and click the circle
…now you will see a list of related tags on the left, and in the middle that same list is represented, the related tags (appearing also as circles), surrounding the tag (middle circle) in question.

If you click on the same tag again, the tags are related by distance (the closer circles means they are frequently used together when tagging a bookmark).

The more stuff you click the more sohisticated the visual becomes, I’m not to sure about my way around here, click the help link to see if you can make sense of it…let me know.

TagsCloud

The weighted (heavily used) tags are of a dark font on the white background.

Hover over a tag and the related tags will turn blue.

Click on a tag and it will appear in the box below, and now the tag will be red, with related tags light red.

Click “hide-non related” to get rid of the non-related tags.

If you click on “filter by posts” a graph appears, with the number of bookmarks for that tag, now when you slide the x axis from 1 to n (cuurent total number of bookmarks with that tag), you will see the related bookmarks appearing or disappearing in the background.

Again click help for more, I’m not used to visual networks, maybe someone else can give a better explanation.

Grouper

Tag set is listed in 3 groups:

Most used
Least used
Commonly used (for the rest)

Again if you hover the mouse over a tag, the related tags (across all groups) are highlighted.

Drag a tag out of a box and create your own group box
…drag other tags into the group, or on the right side of the new box are some icons (drag your page to the left to see them), here you can auto-add related tags.

Read help for more..I really need more time and guidance to get used to these visual representations.

Here is a 40 page PDF explaining revealicious (if you can understand French)…if anyone can translate this, please let me know.

Other visual tools for del.icio.us:

DeliciousMind
delicious soup…see more
delicious tag clouds
vox delicii…see more
del.icio.us direc.tor…see more
extisp.icio.us
Cloudalicious
Grafolicious
sid.vicio.us

…my favourite has to be delicious soup.

Check out the Solutions Watch post for more.

delicious soup is a visualisation tool for del.icio.us…I really had an easy and fun time using this tool.

Similar to a tag cloud but way more visual and juicy, but it goes a step further by allowing you to see the relationship between your tags in another perspective…login and try it.

First you will see a page full of pink jelly bubbles of varying sizes, these are your tags.

The bottom of the box labels the number of tags and the number of posts for your account.

If you hover on a bubble (tag), all the related bubbles (tags) will illuminate, and unrelated bubbles (tags) will disappear
…the bottom of the box will label how many times you have used the tag, the number of related tags, and since ? posts (not sure what this means).

If you click on a bubble (tag) this is when the magic happens, all the unrelated tags disappear, and the related tags circle around the clicked tag (which sits in the middle)…the distance of the related tags indicates the closeness (common bookmarks) of the relationship.
…the bottom of the box adds one more note, in that is tells it has ? number of relationships with a distinct tag (how many times they have been used together in bookmarking an item)
…similarly you can hover over any of the related tags and the label in the box will tell you the number of bookmarks it has in common with the tag in the centre.

The bottom left of the box has some pop-ups that allow you to add colour, label the bubbles with your tag names (this really helps), and if you want to connect the bubbles with lines.

I think this is a very simple and effective tool…informative to see the relationship of the tags I apply to the same bookmarks…good way to visualise your account in order to clean it up, or just to see your interests in another perspective (you can absorb and interpret your tag set in ways you wouldn’t otherwise…this makes it unique and powerful, and an essential for social analysis, well tag analysis anyway)

…oh, and it’s fun to use!

Just had a thought, if you bookmark all your blog posts with a del.icio.us account, kind of a replica of your blog (I do this in order to have title index of my blog), then goto delicious soup…you can view the relationship between your blog categories, and from this see what you blog about the most, least…and basically all the relationships between the different things you blog about.

Solution Watch points to 2 del.icio.us toolbars:

VeryDelicious (Mozilla)

del.icio.us toolbar (del.icio.us)…it is hoped this one will get more fancy.