Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

I have been having trouble with Del.icio.us lately.

All of the bookmarklets where too slow to tag on the fly, so i moved to using Pukka. This took care of the speed issues, and I was able to tag more material faster, and to multiple different accounts.

The big problems began when it came time for retrieving information from my database. When I’m looking for “that article that one guy wrote about that one thing that one time?” Then I can barely remember a tag or two, so what I really need is a fast way to scan through all of the bookmarks containing certain tags. I tried cocoalicious and delicious director, which where closer to what I wanted, but still not quite fast or flexible enough.

Then after another one of my rant’s about how delicious addressed the user’s selfish needs for better bookmarking first, before trying to sell the user’s on the social aspects, I decided I wanted to track down the blog post where I had originally read the idea. After a couple minutes of frustrating search through my delicious account, I decided to call for help. I went to the research machine. The guru of efficiently consuming and archiving data across the web. Rob Finn, of Ventureblogalist.

So, using gmail, I sent him an e-mail that went a little something like this:

Me:

Rob,

Quick question about an article we talked about during tech crunch. I was talking about delicious, and how you needed to have a service that speaks to a users selfish needs first before you sell them on the social aspects. AKA, the hook, the service needs to be useful on its own because people don’t go to delicious to share, they go to have a better way to manage their bookmarks, the social benefits were just an side effect.

Anyway, I’m trying to track downt he article that first said all of that. Any idea where it was?

Then His reply a few seconds later:

http://bokardo.com/archives/learning-more-about-structured-blogging/

How did he find it so fast!! He certainly didn’t use delicious. Well, I’ll attempt to get to the point. It turns out he had set up Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine to search through all of the blogs he reads. As with me, most of the articles/links that get tagged into delicious probably came from these feeds, so its a safe bet that the Google Co-op search will turn up what you were looking for.

Sure enough. Search for two words “delicious” and “selfish”, and you get the Bokardo article as the first result! Hmmm, maybe that’s why Google is a verb. I love finding what I need with a few keystrokes.

Thanks for the great tip Rob. Google Co-op based on my feeds can be found below. I’m sure none of this is totally new or original, but I just didn’t have the time, energy, or brains to put this together sooner.