My Geekdom

When searching through long lists of items on the web, there seem to be two ways to go. Some people seem to prefer what I'll refer to as the "short list" style while others prefer the "long list". The short list, as you may have guessed is one where the number of items listed fills up only a screenful or two of items. They then hit the "next", "more", or page number button to see more items. The long list style people prefer getting many screenfuls on a single page. For lists that are only many screenfuls long, they probably prefer all of the data on one page. I'm assuming that nobody actually prefers to see all 2,872,124 Google hits on one page but perhaps there are.

Most sites give you some adjustment when searching between how many results you see on one page. Unfortunately, for me, a seriously long list guy, most sites don't provide enough for my tastes. For example, let's say you wanted to read all about me (for the sake of my ego, let's pretend that would interest somebody besides my mother), you would go to Google and enter the search term of: "Neil Smithline" -"dr." -"m.d." (I have a 2nd cousin, once removed with the same name - he's a doctor so eliminating pages with "Dr." and "M.D." pretty much eliminates false positives).

At this moment Google is giving me 838 hits (190 without duplicates). That means you'll have to hit the "next" button to read them all as Google, while allowing the number of hits per page to be set in the search preferences page, it only allows 100 hits per page - not nearly enough of me for my tastes.

So, in comes the repagination add-on for Firefox. The way it works is simple, do a search, on Google or practically any other site that ends with a "Next" or "Page 2" link, click on the link and select "Repagination-->All" and the search page you are looking at grows (you can watch the scrollbar shrink as the page grows - cool to watch). All of the pages in the search get concatenated to the first page. Then you can just scroll through the single page and, continuing with our example, select all of the links to Web pages talking about me. Better yet, if you are looking for a specific type of link, you can search through all of the hits without having to search and re-search with different keywords in Google.

And, while I'm on the topic of search enhancements, Linky allows you select links then open them in separate tab. This way, you can select all 190 pages about me and open them in 190 tabs. Linky even seems to have some clever options and algorithms to remove duplicates, only open links that are images, etc...

Oh, in case it isn't clear by now, both of these add-ons work for sites other than using Google and tasks other than researching me (although what could be more important than that ). In fact, they work quite well on most sites.

As I've been playing around with various web thingies, I've become interested in adding "social bookmarking" to my blog. For those of you who don't know, social bookmarking, is a relatively new web technology that is intended to add some ordered to the web. While there are some variations between different social bookmarking sites, the functionality they tend to have in common includes:

1. Move or copy your bookmarks from your browser to a web site. Typically bookmarks are kept in your browser. The major advantage of this is that, with bookmarks stored online, you can switch computers and have all of your bookmarks accessible. Sites such as Yahoo! have had functionality like this for years. The difference between the "old fashioned" bookmark online storage such as Yahoo!'s and the newer flavor is that in the older technology, your bookmarks were private. That is, you had to login to the site to see them. In the social bookmarking sites, while most provide a means of having private bookmarks, publicly viewable bookmarks are highly encouraged.
2. Labeling of bookmarks rather than a folder-based storage. The social bookmarking sites all allow some form of categorization (AKA: "labeling" or "tagging"). The difference between this and the folder-based organization strategies (by folder-based organization, I mean the tree style of bookmarks that IE or FireFox use) is that you can only place a bookmark in one folder. You can copy the bookmark to multiple folders but then you have copies of the bookmark, not a single bookmark. For example, say you wanted to bookmark my blog that you are reading right now. You might want to put it in your "Web Information" folder because, like this, I talk about basic web habits. Perhaps equally appropriate would be your "FireFox Add-Ons" folder or your "Windows Tools" folder or any of several others. Tags solve this by totally removing the concept of folder. The bookmarks are basically all stored next to each other. The way you organize them is to "tag" each bookmark with one or more keywords that describe it.  Going back to this  bookmarking this blog, you could tag it with "webinformation", "firefoxaddons", "firefox", and "windowstools (some sites allow spaces or punctuation in tag names but some don't - lowercase is also typically used). The sites then allow you to show all your bookmarks that contain a specific tag or tags. So, for example, you could ask the site to show you all of your "firefox" sites and this site would appear in it. You can also ask for "webinformation" sites or "windowstools" sites and you also find my blog.
3. Bookmark aggregation. Up till now, everything I've discussed is nice but rather far from revolutionary. But the aggregation functionality is revolutionary. For example, go to del.icio.us (one of the better known (and cooler named) social bookmarking sites), go to the search box in the top right and type in "firefox" and press the "search" button. You will get a list of sites much like a search engine. The difference is that a search engine uses web crawling, sponsorships, and other technologies to figure out in what order the links should be displayed. But on social bookmarking sites, sites that are appropriately tagged (e.g.: "firefox" in our example) are ordered based on how many users have tagged them. You can view social bookmarking as a site popularity contest where everyone gets to vote.

One of the advantages of social-bookmarking is that you only get the primo sites. Google has nearly 200 million hits for "social bookmarking" but del.icio.us has about 108 thousand, about 2,000 times fewer hits. The key is, social bookmarking (theoretically) excludes crappy sites that nobody would bookmark. If a site isn't bookmarked at least once, or if it is bookmarked but isn't tagged with the tag you are searching for, then it won't be returned in your search. By sorting from most tagged sites to least, you presumably get the best sites at the top of your search results.

Social bookmarking sites frequently provide browser plug-ins so that they can be used in a manner similar to the browser's built-in bookmarks. Also, many sites add little tags saying things like "Add This Site To Yahoo!" that give you a one-click strategy to bookmark the site. This brings us back to my initial interest in social bookmarking. I had to decide whether I wanted to have an "Add This Site to Yahoo!" icon, an "Add This Site to Del.icio.us", any of the maybe 20 other social bookmarking sites that I could add, or perhaps even all of them.

Now I've come full-cycle and am back to the title of this blog entry. AddThis is sort of a one-stop-shopping site for all those little "Add This Site ..." icons. AddThis provides you a single icon that, when clicked, provides you a list of many of the social bookmarking sites. Simply click on one of them and you've bookmarked the site. The "Add This Site to ..." icons are only one-click while the AddThis button requires two, but it certainly is simple to implement and keeps my site from having a dozen buttons on it.

So, if you use social bookmarking already, I hope I've made it easier to bookmark my site (which I feel confident you want to :-). If you don't use social bookmarking, click on the "Bookmark" icon and you'll see a long list of sites. You can either just select a site and then start an account there. As an alternative, you can visit the site's home page as some of them have distinctive flavors. Del.icio.us is probably the biggest and, as such, has no serious specialization. On the other hand, Slashdot.org is definitely technology/geek oriented. Choose the one that fits you most. Most of them support some export and import facilities so if you decide to switch it is likely no big deal.