Irish users of del.icio.us pay attention!!!

When adding the bookmark for an Irish website to del.icio.us please do us a big favour by adding one extra tag -

for:oid

That's the word 'for' followed by a colon followed by 'oid', which stands for Open Irish Directory. By using that tag you'll not only save the bookmark as normal to your own account but you'll fire a copy off to our account, for inclusion in the directory. We'll be able to determine by the other tags you used which categories to enter your bookmark under.

You'd be doing us a big favour and it shouldn't take you any more than a few seconds each time. Thanks :-)

UPDATE: I changed the title of this post to use the more authoritative "pay attention!" as used by Damien Mulley. "Please read" was way too feeble ;-)

Comments

[walter]

cool!
How often does your opml file scan del.icio.us ?

[James Corbett]

Well I haven't managed to automate it to that degree yet Walter (wanna help? ;-) but this allows me to subscribe to all submissions in my RSS aggregator and by virtue of the other tags determine which categories to add them to.

I've added PXN8.com now - thanks for submitting.

[Joe]

Hi,

I've posted an entry on my blog which gives you a modified "post to delicious" button that adds this tag automatically.

See http://joedrumgoole.com/blog/?p=41 for details

[James Corbett]

Excellent! Thanks very much for that Joe :)

[Ed Byrne]

What's the goal of the OID? There are a few Irish search sites out there, all of which seem to get pretty badly spammed, and the Open Directory Project seems to have fallen into disrepair with no one really updating it anymore.

A reliable directory if Irish sites would be great - so maybe that's the idea? Could be an awful lot of work for you though to police it!!

[James Corbett]

Ed, as you say, I've always felt that a comprehensive and well maintained directory would be a very valuable resource but I've always been disappointed with what I've seen. That's not to criticise previous (and ongoing) efforts to build directories because I feel that it's through no fault of the builders, rather a shortcoming of the architecture employed.

The iPodder (now indiePodder) directory project demonstrated how a distributed grassroots directory could surmount these problems by building a hierachy based on an OPML outline and sharing the work among numerous node managers. All podcatching clients now make use of the indePodder directories (even Apple's iTunes) which proves the value of an open community built directory.

Being human edited should ensure quality and freshess and if we (Irish bloggers) each take on the responsibility of building and maintaining a node or two it should be no time before it reaches critical mass.

It would be great if you could help us out Ed by volunteering to maintain a node or two with the free OPMLManager.com (or Dave Winer's OPML Editor). There's no pressure time wise and if you could add even a few links per week that would be great. Choose an area that matches your professional interests, your hobbies, your locality - whatever you're passionate about.

What say you?

[Ed Byrne]

Hey if there's no time pressure then I'm in! Put me down for News + Media (minus the bloggers section - I'm sure that'll need a single admin) or create a Marketing section in Business and Economy and I'll look after that.

Drop me a mail with some info on how this'll work and we'll take it from there!

[James Corbett]

Ed, great to have you in on the Open Irish Directory project.

The way to get started on the News & Media node is to use either OPMLManager.com to build and host it or use Dave Winer's OPML Editor to build it and host it yourself. If you'd like to manage the whole News & Media node (that'd be great!) then you can simply do a transclusion/inclusion for the Bloggers subnode which means you can simply make that title a link to the existing Bloggers OPML file. You can point to the one I currently maintain as a subnode or to another if someone else builds one. As the node manager its up to you what subnodes you point to. I envision several Open Irish Directories each mixing and matching nodes according to the taste of the top-level architect. For instance you or anyone else may not agree with my top-level category designations and so are free to build an alternative at any time. Of course I'll gladly listen to suggestions too :-)

Alternatively you could create a separate OPML file for each of the News & Media subcategories (excluding the Blogging one obviously) and I could transclude/include each one of them in the top-level category. Perhaps you'd like to maintain it all as a single node to begin with and divide it out into separate nodes as we progress. I can make the necessary changes on the higher level node at any time.

I'll also create a Marketing section in the Business & Economy category right away and you can build a node for that too if you like - any help is appreciated. I'm going to create a new Yahoo! Group to coordinate the project volunteers shortly so that we can all get on the same page on this.

Thanks again and let me know if I can help with anything.