Anti-social Tagging

The sharing and co-operative commenting of bookmark-like links is a very interesting idea. It takes the slashdot/scoop idea to the extreme because everybody can dump what they find interesting and sort other suggestions by keywords aka tags. Popular implementations such as del.icio.us or CiteULike are nice and well, but they are centralized, easy to flood and a bit too open for my taste. So I was happy to see that Ricardo Signes wrote Rubric, a free implementation of a del.icio.us work-alike, and Steve Mallet at de.lirio.us adapted the interface to make it look like del.icio.us.
I'm testing it right now and would like to run my own tagged bookmark store, integrate part of them with this blog and share the links with friends.
The Rubric code depends on loads of Perl modules and it takes some few minutes to configure it. Ricardo provides scripts to import existing link-lists quickly, without going through the web interface. The input format is a YAML dump of a reference to an array of hashes with certain keys. I wrote a little script to convert Lynx's bookmarks to that format.
Stay tuned …
Update: the script now works for "DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1", i.e. Firefox, Mozillas as well.

Thu, 07 Apr 2005
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