New Delicious Is Not That Tasty

I returning to using Delicious a few weeks ago, after a long hiatus, mostly because I had read that it was going to be relaunched with updated sensibilities. This morning I discovered a new Delicious when I created a link, and I have to say, I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick: it’s not that tasty.

Marshall Kirkpatrick,  New Delicious is a Bitter Disappointment

A tool that lets everyday people organize links of interest to them and as a result create user-generated metadata, discovery pipelines, resource search powered by passive popularity - the power and potential of the network effects in the old Delicious were amazing.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that those qualities were appreciated in the relaunch. Quite the opposite. (No RSS feeds?!) The concept of collections of websites (“stacks”) doesn’t feel new or fresh anymore. Big pictures are nice but they’re hardly new or fresh either.

It feels to me like in its effort to go mainstream, the new Delicious has lost or underplayed its strengths and not yet shown us anything new that has world-changing potential. Maybe it will come back as a result of the tagging that happens as stacks are created. I don’t know.

I am not interested in creating stacks of links. I was hoping that the new delicious would reposition the tool in my workflow, with better integration with Tumblr and other tools.

Instead, the new Delicious is an attempt to become a destination site, attracting people to moderated lists or ‘stacks’. Yawn.

So, I am officially back to looking for the missing pieces in my world: a place to note things I have read and what I want to read. I think I will simply try to figure out a way to do that on Tumblr, directly.

China Consolidates Control of Rare Earth Industry - Keith Bradsher

China produces nearly 95 percent of the world’s rare earth materials, and it is taking the steps to improve pollution controls in a notoriously toxic mining and processing industry. But the moves also have potential international trade implications and have started yet another round of price increases for rare earths, which are vital for green-energy products including giant wind turbines, hybrid gasoline-electric cars and compact fluorescent bulbs. General Electric, facing complaints in the United States about rising prices for its compact fluorescent bulbs, recently noted in a statement that if the rate of inflation over the last 12 months on the rare earth element europium oxide had been applied to a $2 cup of coffee, that coffee would now cost $24.55.
I read in Wikipedia that rare earths are distributed globally, but it will take years to build up the infrastructure to process them in reasonable quantities.

At TechCrunch Conference, Talk of a Bubble - NYTimes.com

Curiously, the answer to the question of whether a new tech bubble existed was not determined by wealth or status, but rather age.

It doesn’t mean the older people who fear a bubble are right, but they might be seeing the signs. Or maybe they are scared of the shadow of other mounting and bad economic news?

Hunter-gatherer populations show humans are hardwired for density « Per Square Mile

Research by Marcus Hamilton, Bruce Milne, Robert Walker, and Jim Brown have found a power law for hunter-gatherer density.

Though their survey of 339 present-day hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t explicitly mention cities, it does show that as populations grow, people tend to live closer together—much closer together. For every doubling of population, the home ranges of hunter-gatherer groups increased by only 70 percent.

If This Then That: Universal Gasketry

I heard about a service called ifttt.com (If This Then That), that provides an amazing service. It allows a ‘if-then’ sort of integration between common web services, like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and many others.

I used it to do a few things. Most specifically, I set up an account and twiddled thinigs so that I everytime I create a Delicioius bookmark that is tagged ‘blogworthy’ it will publish that bookmark as a Tumblr link post on stoweboyd.com.

Here’s an image of the ‘task’ I created:

Apologies for the faintness of the various parameters above. The tool wizards you through creating tasks, asking you to connect to the various services as needed. I attached to my Delicious account — which I have just started using again — as the ‘trigger’ of the task, choosing the hook of a specific tag. I then opted to post the link to my Tumblr account as the ‘action’, selecting the appropriate ‘add-ins’ — possible parameters — for a link post.

The whole thing was a ten minute exercise.

In order to create a similar arrangement for my underpaidgenius blog required me to create a second ifttt account, because the tool is currently limited to supporting a single Tumblr login per account. But now I can post links to a single stoweboyd Delicious account, and based on two different tags I can direct link posts to either of my Tumblr blogs, which is a feature that Tumblr has not seen fit to offer in their bookmarklet editor. And of course, I now have all my links — posted or non-posted — in one place.

Tasks can be converted to ‘recipes’ which are templates that can be used by other ifttt users (minus your account login info, of course). I created some others, like a recipe that posts a tweet to my Tumblr account if I favorite it.

A very cool bit of gasketry.