blog.thoughtwax.com

This week I dinged a thousand bookmarks on del.icio.us and thought it might be interesting to examine how I’ve used the service over the last couple of years. Firstly, some raw data:

• I’ve posted 1000 bookmarks since 25th March 2004. That’s 1480 days ago, so I posted an average of 4.73 bookmarks a week.
• Amazingly, I used 999 distinct tags, so obviously I’m introducing an average of one new tag for every bookmark. 568 tags are used only once. The most-used tag is design, appearing on 104 bookmarks.
• The number of tags on individual bookmarks ranges from 1 (on 11 bookmarks) to 15 (on 1). There are 4702 tags in all (including duplication across different bookmarks), and so each bookmark has an average of 4.7 tags.

I guess the most noteworthy thing out of all of that is the coincidental near-exact matching of the number of bookmarks with distinct tags (1000/999), and the average bookmarks per week with average tags per bookmark (4.73/4.70). I have no idea if this really is just a coincidence or an effect of some unconscious underlying usage pattern.

Here’s the frequency of my posting those thousand links:

Here are my top 10 tags of all time:

But really, the commonly used tags are only a small part of the data compared to the long tail of little-used tags. The same top ten tags are to the left of the vertical blue line on this chart showing the number of times each tag was used:

There’s lots more that could be read from a dataset this size; it would be nice if del.icio.us actually did some of these calculations for you. I made these charts with the del.icio.us API, Google Charts API, and the handy Python Google Chart wrapper. Congratulations to Mr. Chuck Klosterman of Esquire Magazine (whose book I’m also reading right now) on being my 1000th customer.

And now another one about Twitter, sort of. As with the cycling post, I’m not positively nuts about Twitter (and God knows there’s already enough aggrandising analysis about it out there already), but it’s undeniably magnetic. On a completely different track, I was looking for a reference in a post I wrote almost exactly a year ago about what I thought a multiplayer videogame might be like in the future, and came across this passage:

There will certainly be more cross-pollination between the game and the web, and between your activities in-game and your activities on the web. Just like your real life bleeds into your online life via your blog and your Flickr account, that reflected online persona will in turn become drawn into your gaming persona. Gaming will probably become a pretty poor label for what eventually emerges (as it becomes less about play and more about interaction and creation), but the name will stick, just like “talkies” never really caught on over “movies” in the cinema. Virtual space will feel more like an actual space (it might even be actual space), more like something you inhabit than somewhere you pass through. You’ll leave traces of where you’ve been behind you, and you’ll return after a break to see the traces of others that were there in the interim, and this sense of effect and permanence will infuse the entire game and encourage continued interaction, just as the gradual accumulation of an archive of blog posts rewards the ongoing effort of writing.

It doesn’t quite have the property of capturing passive activities or play that I was pushing for, but it’s not a stretch to read that and draw some parallels with the model of interaction that makes Twitter attractive. I wrote that a just year ago, last July, and already the fact that Flickr was the only service that was available to reference seems slightly clunky and antiquated.

This post tries to figure out how you could explain a news item about World of Warcraft being spammed to someone from thirty years ago, and the scale of the backstory necessary is just fantastically funny. I had a conversation the other day about long term predictions. I argued that a certain science fiction-style technological breakthrough wouldn’t happen in my lifetime, but now I’m not quite so sure. Not because of something as trivial as Twitter, of course, but just because even though I thought I knew something a few months ago, you just don’t see this stuff coming.

Here’s a fun thing: using blogs to re-publish old episodic content.

Samuel Pepy’s diary has been published as a blog since 2003. Bible RSS feeds for your daily scriptures (see also Blogging the Bible by David Plotz on Slate). It’s Bloomsday, but is reading Ulysses a page a day via RSS any more manageable than the dead tree version? Steven Wright and Jenny Holzer are rocking opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum over on Twitter (never before, I think, has a medium been put to such perfectly apt use). Each day last February I posted the 28 chapters of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

If God didn’t want us to add widgets to our websites he wouldn’t have created sidebars.

I added a Javascript call to the Twitter API to display my latest update on this site a while ago, but it slowed page load down quite a bit, so I removed it again (at least until Twitter get their scaling problems under control). I could have written some server side code to cache my latest update, but it didn’t seem worth the effort.

Then Google released the very cool AJAX Feed API this week, and I stayed up for hours playing with it. One of the many ways you can use the API is to hit Google’s more reliable servers for the latest cached version of a feed (from the same data source that Google Reader uses). So instead of accessing your feed directly, pipe it through Google and call it easily with Javascript.

To display your latest Twitter status, add these lines between your web page’s head tags:

Replace YOUR_TWITTER_ID_NUMBER with your Twitter feed ID (the number in the URL of your Twitter RSS feed) and replace YOUR_API_KEY with your Google Ajax Feeds API key, which you can get here.

Then add this HTML where you want your latest update to appear:

Lovely. Example here.