Everyone has a social bookmark tagging button these days; Del.icio.us has updated its usual button to be more functional, and renamed it as well.
Although pop culture can be obscure for some people, ie not everyone gets the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts, the minds behind the Delicious bookmarking service go for the even more obscure Internet culture with their badges badges badges badges BOOKMARKS BOOKMARKS homage.
It’s all good, though.
Delicious now has the Tagometer available for its users. The Tagometer fulfills a wish for the Delicious blogger DeusX, who has wanted to “find some way to get more of what’s going on here to show up out there.”
So what is a Tagometer? Glad you asked:
Like simpler static widgets, it includes a button inviting readers to bookmark your page on del.icio.us. The Tagometer opens things up from there – using a JSON data feed from del.icio.us, the Tagometer includes an up-to-date count of others who’ve already bookmarked the page, as well as a fresh list of the top tags applied.
Visitors can click on the count to see more detail on who bookmarked your page, when they did it, and how they tagged it. The list of tags shows visitors why your page is interesting, and clicking on a tag takes them to similar sites on del.icio.us.
This is what it looks like in action. You Delicious users reading this can go ahead and bookmark this article, then come back to see the results.
(Yes I know this is a shameless bit of promotion as well as a useful exercise in demonstrating the Tagometer. Man up and click the darn thing already.)
The Internets like the Tagometer too. Loren Baker called it “Deliciously Refreshing,” a comment that not only shows appreciation but refers to how it updates, or “refreshes,” as more people save and tag it. Spiffy!
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch seems to lament the lack of drama Josh Schachter and company have generated since Yahoo picked them up in an acquisition:
News from Del.icio.us has been slow the last year – a couple of controversies and some solid overall growth. It’s an example of something the Internet really needed, but it’s also a bit of a one-trick pony….I love Del.icio.us, but there isn’t much else to say about it, and the Yahoo team seems to be focused on getting del.icio.us, Yahoo Bookmarks and My Web onto a single back end platform.
Maybe that’s the great strength of Delicious. Its functionality is straightforward, and the mechanism to get a page into Delicious requires minimal effort. In an age of increasingly complex applications, sometimes the direct approach is the best.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
