del.icio.us as a cognitive engine?

del.icio.us is a popular and good site for tagging, and many people have devised many different ways to use it. The categorisation method I have recently started using in this blog is also based on the tagging ability of del.icio.us, a blogger hack I learnt from FreshBlog.

As I stumbled on Typo just now, I suddenly discovered another use of del.icio.us : when you come across a new site and don't know what it is all about, the fasted way to find out about it is not to read the description on the site, but to try to bookmark the site using del.icio.us. This is because when you try to bookmark the site (typically using the 'remember this' bookmarklet), del.icio.us will display the form for you to tag the site, along with the recommended tags that del.icio.us thinks that will be relevant for this site (I guess this is based on tagging by other users).

As a result, at a glance you will know the possible tags that this site could fall under, and this can tell you a lot about the site. Take the Typo site for example, when I clicked my bookmarklet, the recommended tags are:

ajax blog blogging blogtool development engine framework opensource programming rails ruby rubyonrails tool tools wordpress

Apparently these are tags taken from my existing tags, but the important thing is that del.icio.us immediately told me a lot about typo based on tags I understand - tags I use. Within 2 seconds, I can conclude that Typo is a blogging tool, opensourced, based on ruby on rails and is somewhat related to wordpress (substite or enhancement, that I will have to find out by reading more on the Typo site).

So del.icio.us can sometimes even be turned into a cognitive engine to tell me about a site before I need to read anything from the site, and the best part is it tells me this by using tags I use.

Filed in: del.icio.us