Michael Maranda said:

Regarding http://del.icio.us

Aside from some avid users of this bookmarking site/tool, do we have any of the site developers/proprieters in our fold? Can they be brought into this discussion?

Although our discussion has centered on the taxonomy (the purpose of the discussion) I think there might be some functionality in del.icio.us that might require extension. Also, I have questions about the overall stability of the site, and its long term direction.

Is this a technology that will be shared (or is it available to share)? Do the site owners require additional resurces to make the site more robust?

There are certain functionalities I would like... importing and exporting bookmarks for instance. Also, group tagging (where you can tage several bookmarks at once with same tag). I am sure there are others.

Michael,

You can find out more about del.icio.us on its about page. There is a pretty robust mailing list (it's linked from that page) which gives you access to people working on the tool. Because del.icio.us has an open api it's possible to get at the kind of information/functionality that you are talking about. I don't know of any del.icio.us add-ons that give you the group bookmarking functionality.

There isn't an explicit export function. I've bungled my way around this by periodically downloading the XML file associated with my del.icio.us account. I can open the resulting file in Excel (or the spreadsheet application of your choice) and can get at my data (links, tags, etc). I'm sure there is a more elegant way to do this but it seems to work just fine.

I think I get at the point of your questions: we are talking about using an application that we don't control (at all) for a project that could end up becoming kind of important to all of us and providing valuable information for seeding other relevant projects. Now, if I was consulting with a nonprofit organization I'd say don't do it. However, I think this tool gives us the power to jump start this effort before codifying it into some other application.

I guess that begs two questions: How are we going to get the word about this out to a broader audience and where will store the resulting data so that it can be used by anyone interested?