So you probably already know about Firefox’s live bookmarks. They let you turn the contents of any RSS feed into a virtual folder where each feed item becomes a bookmark.

Then there is del.icio.us, which is a “social bookmarks” repository. After you’ve groked the Label concept in Gmail (or the Tag concept in Flickr), del.icio.us is a really handy, central, shareable repository to track and organize links to sites that interest you.

The del.icio.us site will give you an RSS feed to any public label in your account or across all accounts. For example, this feed returns any websites which I have tagged “java”: http://del.icio.us/rss/mwoodman/java , and here is another feed containing all sites which the whole user community has tagged as “geek”:
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/geek .

Here’s the fun part: Use Firefox to “live bookmark” any del.icio.us RSS feed, and you now have a really new-school (centralized, automatically updated, Mozilla-powered) way to get an old-school dropdown bookmark menus in your browser. Here’s what that looks like (click to enlarge):

This can be quite handy if you have a different machine at home than you do at work, but want to have synchronized bookmarks; keep your links at del.icio.us, and put a live bookmark folder on every machine you use.

Another fun application is to use the “popular” feature in del.icio.us to get RSS feeds which contain only the most-linked-to sites for a given tag. (Think Google’s page rank, but determined one person at a time.)

I like to use the popular tag feeds like the one for “ajax” as a FireFox live bookmark. Now the most-linked to sites on this topic are automatically added to my live bookmark folder. Very cool.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 at 16:49 and is filed under personal, syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.