Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Très bon billet de Bernard Rappaz de la Télévision Suisse Romande sur son (tout frais) weblog: le journaliste face au blog.
[en] Bernard Rappaz is a journalist at the Télévision Suisse Romande (Swiss French-speaking TV). His weblog opens on a very nice post about journalists and weblogging.
Mieux vaut tard que jamais, je viens de prendre la peine de lire l’excellente entrée en matière de Bernard Rappaz sur son weblog. J’aime quand “ça sent l’intelligence”!
En voilà donc un qui vient de trouver sa place dans mon aggrégateur. Monsieur Rappaz, vous pouvez vous considérer comme lu 🙂
Encore un médiocre article sur les weblogs. Et je me permets de relever leur utilisation de “joueb” comme traduction de “blog”…
[en] A short comment on this article on blogs in Switzerland which clearly doesn't get it (Yet Another Lame Article on Weblogs).
Là , très franchement, je vais me fâcher tout rouge. Qu’on parle de “joueb” dans le cadre de Joueb.com, je veux bien, mais qu’on utilise ce mot comme traduction de l’anglais “blog” sans sourciller dans ce plutôt moyen article sur les weblog en Suisse, cela me donne à penser que le traducteur, du moins, n’a pas trop mis les pieds dans la blogosphère romande.
Donc, chers lecteurs, sachez qu’il y a des weblogs en Suisse. Mis à part ça, je ne vais pas m’amuser à démonter l’article en question, tellement il me semble évident qu’il s’agit d’une reprise très standard du thème “ils ont pas compris les blogs” par quelqu’un qui, visiblement, n’a pas compris grand-chose non plus.
Prochain pas à attendre: que ces «blogueurs» fabriquent eux-mêmes leurs nouvelles.
Comme me le fait remarquer Suw, la simple présence d’une phrase comme celle-ci, dans un article sur les weblogs, en dit bien long…
This very long post is, for the first time in English, a pretty complete account of what has been going on with U-blog and Loïc Le Meur in the French blogosphere for some time now. With the acquisition of Ublog by Six Apart, these problems are bound to take another dimension for the English-speaking blogosphere.
[fr] Ce très long billet expose en anglais l'histoire de U-blog et des problèmes s'y rapportant. J'ai déjà écrit à ce sujet en français (lire également les commentaires) -- pour une fois que la "barrière linguistique" empêche les anglophones de savoir certaines choses, plutôt que le contraire!
So, why on earth are U-bloggers so angry?
I’m often concerned that the language divide makes non-English-speaking people miss out on a whole lot of interesting stuff. These past few days, I’ve been concerned that the language divide may be preventing English-speaking people from knowing about certain things. U-bloggers are angry, and they also have the sympathy of others in the franco-blogosphere, but all that is happening in French.
How aware is Six Apart that they have a bunch of angry french customers, who were encouraged to sign up for a paying version before the end of last year under promise of new features, which weren’t developed and seemingly never will? Edit 06.01.05: see note.
Let’s rewind a bit, shall we? I always think that history explains a lot. Many of the dates here are taken from Laurent’s short history of the franco-blogosphere, a work in progress. Other information comes from my regular trips around the blogosphere and my conversations with people — in particularly, here, with Stéphane, the creator of the U-blog weblogging platform. This is the story to the best of my knowledge. If there are any factual mistakes, I’ll be glad to correct them.
In November 2002, Stéphane Le Solliec starts working on a blogging platform he calls Meta-blog. A few months later, in December, U-blog (the new name for the platform) already has a few hundreds of users.
The interface is good, U-blog is pretty zippy, and it has a great community. Also, it’s French. Setting aside any primal xenophobia or anti-americanism, a great product designed in your language by a fellow countryman is not the same thing as another great product translated and adapted from English. (Ask somebody who lives in a country where most of the important stuff is “imported” from the German-speaking part…) And let’s face it, one does like to support a local product, whether one is French, Swiss, or American. I actually considered U-blog the best hosted solution for French-speakers, at some point, and recommended it to a few friends, who started weblogs. Joueb.com is a native French weblogging platform which has been around for far longer than U-blog, but for some reason it isn’t quite as popular.
About a year later, Stéphane is thinking about abandoning the platform. He’s doing it on his free time, he has a baby, and U-blog takes up a lot of time. He stalls development, and stops allowing the creation of new free blogs. (It will again be possible to create free blogs a few weeks later.) Existing free blogs remain in place, but lose visibility (pinging and home page) compared to paying blogs. (Paying U-blog customers pay 1€ per month.)
Around that time, Loïc, whose interest in weblogs has been sparked by meeting Joi at the World Economic Forum, and who has unsuccessfully approached the founder of Joueb.com, Stéphane Gigandet (yes! another Stéphane!), gets in touch with Stéphane Le Solliec in September (2003). As a result, he acquires the platform and user-base, and founds the company Ublog.com. Loïc really wants Stéphane to stay on board, and he does, before leaving a couple of months later (company-life isn’t really his cup of tea).
Loïc does a great job getting the French press (and later, politicians) interested in weblogs. He calls up journalists, educates them, and before long Loïc, fondateur de Ublog
regularly appears in articles about weblogging. Inevitably, he starts appearing as “the guy who introduced weblogs in France”, and the expression “founder of Ublog” entertains a confusion between the blogging platform and the company (“founder” being at times replaced by “creator”). Loïc founded the company, but he in no way created the blogging platform U-blog.
You can imagine that the U-bloggers, who already weren’t very excited about having been “bought” (particularly by a guy who had the bad taste to start blogging in English), didn’t really like seeing Loïc shine so bright and Stéphane slowly fade into oblivion. Some long-standing French-speaking webloggers external to U-blog will start keeping a suspicious eye on this newcomer that so many are talking about, and who seems to be (God forbid!) making weblogs into a business (complete with press pack).
End October, when Stéphane announces the changes at Ublog following the association with Loïc, the following structure is presented (as an aside, the fact that this page seems to have been taken down doesn’t make Ublog look good. If it’s a mistake, they should put it back up again):
In a smart move, existing U-bloggers were given the chance to sign up for the second offer for 1€ instead of 4€ for the coming year, starting January 1st (date at which the new tariff would become active). It sounded attractive, and quite a few went for it. The future seemed bright, with promise of dynamic future development, despite the complaints about the increase in pricing (but which did not impact existing users that much).
During the next months, some new features are introduced. More are announced.
In March, Six Apart and Ublog SA sign an exclusive representation agreement in Europe. An announcement is made in the U-blog newsletter. April 29th, TypePad arrives on U-blog. The official Ublog weblog will publish another four or five brief posts related to TypePad before going quiet.
One can wonder: what sense does it make for a blogging platform like U-blog to sign an agreement with another, similar, hosted blogging platform like TypePad? Was the U-blog platform not good enough? Will development be stalled on the “old” platform, will it be abandoned? Overall, U-bloggers are worried and unhappy (I could add more, but those are two good starting-points and seem to sum it up pretty well). They are now offered three possibilities (as often, what is said in the comments is much more interesting than the post itself):
In short, all new development efforts seem to be going towards TypePad, and U-blog Plus will stop evolving, unlike what had been promised end of October. Reactions are aggressive (we all know that end-users are not kind when they complain). When U-bloggers ask about the new features that had been promised to those of them with paying accounts, they are told that the features are on TypePad. Loïc, who has already ruffled a few feathers by demanding that a popular blogger remove a post about him, under threat of lawsuit, does not distinguish himself in the area of good customer relations. (In particular, his comment regarding the contents of Aurora’s weblog (bondage and S&M), in the middle of a thread about U-blog and TypePad, didn’t look very good.) U-bloggers (particularly the paying ones) feel a bit cheated.
There is no question for me that Loïc is being given a harder time than he deserves, but it is pretty clear that he is not doing a very good job communicating with his unhappy customers.
TypePad.fr does not seem to be a howling success. I have heard complaints of people who find it slow (slower than U-blog, in particular) and not intuitive. Jean-Luc Raymond, the blogger who runs MediaTIC, publishes a critical post about TypePad.fr. Now, JLR isn’t the blogger I respect the most. He doesn’t always verify his sources, and has been known to remove embarrassing comments and posts with little ceremony. However, if his article on TypePad is over the top (as I suspect it might), it would in my opinion deserve more precise refutation than this dismissive comment of Loïc’s.
So, what is going on today? Basically, a continuation of what was already going wrong. Now that Six Apart has bought Ublog, the U-blog platform and communitydefinitely seem doomed.
No official announcement of the transaction has been made on the U-blog site (as I mentioned, the official “corporate” weblog is dead). Loïc’s answer to my post raising the point is that U-bloggers who want information can contact him on his blog. Worse, in my opinion, Loïc withheld the announcement on his blog until it was published by the media. So in the franco-blogosphere, we learnt about it through the press rather than through Loïc’s weblog (the de facto official source of information for U-blog, as the company site has not been communicating anything these last months).
Aurora goes to war, and other U-bloggers are following suit. One can disapprove of their virulence, but calling them “Aurora’s fan-club” (in the comments to my post) does not get anybody anywhere, and mocking Aurora’s sexual preferences in response to her criticisms is distasteful, and unbecoming of the Director for Europe, Africa and the Middle-East and Executive VP of Six Apart.
Loïc may have a squeaky-clean image in the anglo-blogosphere, but it is far from being the case in the franco-blogosphere, particularly when you start digging around in comment threads. I find it especially disturbing that there seems to be a discrepancy in attitude between Loïc’s discourse on his weblog and his comments on other people’s weblogs.
I personally do not think Loïc is a bad person, or has bad intentions. He’s interested in “the business side of weblogs” (and in that we differ), and that of course will make him unsympathetic to some, but I do believe he is genuinely interested in what he’s doing. However, I think he does not understand his customers very well, and does not communicate with them well either. His ambition as a businessman, excited by the challenge of managing an American company, leader in its domain
, does at times seem to overshadow his concern about his end-users well-being.
This has been a long post. If you’ve read it, thank you. If you’ve just skimmed it, let me briefly come back on my main points:
Update, 24.07.04: a brief update after some comments I’ve received about this article.
Pourquoi les weblogueurs cessent-ils de bloguer? Par manque de lectorat, certes, mais je me demande si une attitude de l’ordre de “que vais-je donc écrire sur mon blog aujourd’hui” ne joue également un rôle dans le risque d’abandon de weblog.
[en] Why do bloggers stop blogging? As Stefan mentioned at BlogTalk, lack of readership and feedback is certainly a factor in weblog abandonment. Remembering a question I answered the day before the conference on a weblog survey, I wonder if a "what am I going to blog today" attitude doesn't increase the risk of weblog abandonment (as opposed to bloggers who just have stuff in their head that needs to get out.) What do you think?
Ça revient régulièrement sur le devant de la scène: le blog-blues. Tel ou tel ferme son weblog, arrête de bloguer, quitte la blogosphère à grands fracas (pour parfois revenir ensuite) ou s’en va à pas de souris. Pourquoi les blogueurs arrêtent-ils?
Lors de BlogTalk, Stefan Glänzer s’est posé la question: Does Blogging Suck?
Sur 20six.de, il semblerait que 82% des bloguers abandonnent leur weblog au bout de quelques mois.
Sans lecteurs, on ferme. Epitaphes-type:
Je vois cependant souvent des weblogs “bien lus” fermer. C’est en général de ceux-là qu’on entend parler, inévitablement — les lecteurs se plaignent! La grandeur du lectorat n’est certainement pas le seul facteur, et j’ai ma petite hypothèse sur la question.
En écoutant la conférence de Stefan, j’ai repensé au questionnaire sur les weblogs que j’avais rempli le soir précédant. Une des questions m’a frappée — elle disait à peu près ceci: “Lesquelles des sources suivantes consultez-vous régulièrement afin d’y trouver des choses à bloguer?” (suivait une liste de genre de sites susceptibles de servir d’inspiration au bloguer qui en manquerait).
Et là , je me suis retrouvée perplexe. Je ne vais jamais à la recherche de matière à bloguer! Je ne me demande jamais de quoi je pourrais bien parler aujourd’hui. Soit il y a quelque chose qui me trotte dans la tête et je l’écris (ou pas), soit il n’y a rien et je n’écris rien. Jamais je ne vais activement chercher un sujet de billet.
Je me demande donc s’il y aurait pas une corrélation entre cette attitude (“chercher quoi bloguer”) et le risque d’abandon du weblog.
Qu’en pensez-vous? En ce qui vous concerne, est-ce que vous cherchez des sujets de billet, ou bien est-ce qu’ils “viennent à vous”? Vous demandez-vous ce que vous allez bien pouvoir écrire aujourd’hui? Ce que vous avez à dire à ce sujet m’intéresse grandement.
My weblog turns four today. A brief look back on what has changed since then.
[fr] Mon weblog a quatre ans aujourd'hui. Voici une brève retrospective. Mon interview Blogpipole vous racontera en français comment j'ai commencé à bloguer.
Four years already that this weblog exists! Over a thousand posts, an insane number of categories, and somewhere between 200 and 550 visitors a day — depending on my posting frequency, the weather, and if Joi mentions one of my posts or not ;-). I have never been a frighteningly prolific blogger, but well, there must be something to be said for keeping it up all these years!
Four years ago, I was at my brother’s, I had been back in Switzerland less than a month after spending a year in India, and I stumbled upon Blogger after seeing it mentioned a few times on the sites of the kind folk who haunted the much-regretted Astounding Web forums.
I couldn’t really figure out what this Blogger thing did, so I created an account, and I saw the light.
I’ve gone from fiercly anonymous to having my name “all over the web”, I now have my own server, I’ve learnt CSS, PHP and MySQL in the process, launched three other websites, and travelled around Europe quite a bit, meeting fellow bloggers.
Here is an explanation of how I set up WordPress to manage my bilingual weblog. I give all the code I used to do it, and announce some of the things I’d like to implement. A “Multilingual blogging” TopicExchange channel is now open.
[fr] J'explique ici quelles sont les modifications que j'ai faites à WordPress pour gérer le bilinguisme de mon weblog -- code php et css à l'appui. Je mentionne également quelques innovations que j'ai en tête pour rendre ce weblog plus sympathique à mes lecteurs monolingues (ce résumé en est une!) Un canal pour le weblogging multilingue a été ouvert sur TopicExchange, et vous y trouverez peut-être d'autres écrits sur le même sujet. Utilisez-le (en envoyant un trackback) si vous écrivez des billets sur le multinguisme dans les weblogs!
My weblog is bilingual, and has been since November 2000. Already then, I knew that I wouldn’t be capable of producing a site which duplicates every entry in two languages.
I think this would defeat the whole idea of weblogging: lowering the “publication barrier”. I feel like writing something, I quickly type it out, press “Publish”, and there we are. Imposing upon myself to translate everything just pushes it back up again. I have seen people try this, but I have never seen somebody keep it up for anything nearing four years (this weblog is turning four on July 13).
This weblog is therefore happily bilingual, as I am — sometimes in English, sometimes in French. This post is about how I have adapted the blogging tools I use to my bilingualism, and more importantly, how I can accommodate my monolingual readers so that they also feel comfortable here.
First thing to note: although weblogging tools are now ready to be used by people speaking a variety of languages (thanks to a process named “localization”), they remain monolingual. Language is determined at weblog-level.
With Movable Type, I used categories to emulate post-level language awareness. This wasn’t satisfying at all: I ended up with to monstrous categories, Français and English, which didn’t help keep rebuild times down.
With WordPress, the solution is far more satisfying: I store the language information as Post Meta, or “custom field”. No more category exploitation for something they shouldn’t be used for.
Before I really got started doing the exciting stuff, I made a quick change to the WordPress admin interface. If I was going to be adding a “language” custom field to each and every post of mine, I didn’t want to be doing it with the (imho) rather clumsy “Custom Fields” form.
In edit.php, just after the categorydiv fieldset, I inserted the following:
<fieldset id="languagediv">
<legend>< ?php _e('Language') ?></legend>
<div><input type="text" name="language" size="7"
tabindex="2" value="en" id="language" /></div>
</fieldset>
(You’ll probably have to move around your tabindex values so that the tabbing order makes sense to you.)
I also tweaked the wp-admin.css file a bit to keep it looking reasonably pretty, adding the rule below:
#languagediv {
height: 3.5em;
width: 5em;
}
and adding #languagediv everywhere I could see #poststatusdiv, so that they obeyed the same rules.
In this way, I have a small text field to edit to set the language. I pre-set it to “en”, and have just to change it to “fr” if I am writing in French.
We just need to add a little piece of code in the form processing script, post.php, just after the line that says add_meta($post_ID):
// add language
if(isset($_POST['language']))
{
$_POST['metakeyselect'] = 'language';
$_POST['metavalue'] = $_POST['language'];
add_meta($post_ID);
}
The first thing I do with this language information is styling posts differently depending on the language. I do this by adding a lang attribute to my post <div>:
<div class="post" lang="<?php $post_language=get_post_custom_values("language"); $the_language=$post_language['0']; print($the_language); ?>">
In the CSS, I add these rules:
div.post:lang(fr) h2.post-title:before {
content: " [fr] ";
font-weight: normal;
}
div.post:lang(en) h2.post-title:before {
content: " [en] ";
font-weight: normal;
}
div.post:lang(fr)
{
background-color: #FAECE7;
}
I also make sure the language of the date matches the language of the post. For this, I added a new function, the_time_lg(), to my-hacks.php. I then use the following code to print the date: <?php the_time_lg($the_language); ?>.
Can more be done? Yes! I know I have readers who are not bilingual in the two languages I use. I know that at times I write a lot in one language and less in another, and my “monolingual” readers can get frustrated about this. During a between-session conversation at BlogTalk, I suddenly had an idea: I would provide an “other language” excerpt for each of my posts.
I’ve been writing excerpts for each of my posts for the last six months now, and it’s not something that raises the publishing barrier for me. Quickly writing a sentence or two about my post in the “other language” is something I can easily do, and it will at least give my readers an indication about what is said in the posts they can’t understand. This is the first post I’m trying this with.
So, as I did for language above, I added another “custom field” to my admin interface (in edit-form.php). Actually, I didn’t stop there. I also added the field for the excerpt to the “simple controls” posting page that I use (set that in Options > Writing), and another field for keywords, which I also store for each post as meta data. Use at your convenience:
<!-- BEGIN BUNNY HACK -->
<fieldset style="clear:both">
<legend><a href="http://wordpress.org/docs/reference/post/#excerpt"
title="<?php _e('Help with excerpts') ?>"><?php _e('Excerpt') ?></a></legend>
<div><textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="5" id="excerpt">
<?php echo $excerpt ?></textarea></div>
</fieldset>
<fieldset style="clear:both">
<legend><?php _e('Other Language Excerpt') ?></legend>
<div><textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="other-excerpt"
tabindex="6" id="other-excerpt"></textarea></div>
</fieldset>
<fieldset style="clear:both">
<legend><?php _e('Keywords') ?></legend>
<div><textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="keywords" tabindex="7" id="keywords">
<?php echo $keywords ?></textarea></div>
</fieldset>
<!-- I moved around some tabindex values too -->
<!-- END BUNNY HACK -->
I inserted these fields just below the “content” fieldset, and styled the #keywords and #other-excerpt textarea fields in exactly the same way as #excerpt. Practical translation: open wp-admin.css, search for “excerpt”, and modify the rules so that they look like this:
#excerpt, #keywords, #other-excerpt {
height: 1.8em;
width: 98%;
}
instead of simply this:
#excerpt {
height: 1.8em;
width: 98%;
}
I’m sure by now you’re curious about what my posting screen looks like!
To make sure the data in these fields is processed, we need to add the following code to post.php (as we did for the “language” field above):
// add keywords
if(isset($_POST['keywords']))
{
$_POST['metakeyselect'] = 'keywords';
$_POST['metavalue'] = $_POST['keywords'];
add_meta($post_ID);
}
// add other excerpt
if(isset($_POST['other-excerpt']))
{
$_POST['metakeyselect'] = 'other-excerpt';
$_POST['metavalue'] = $_POST['other-excerpt'];
add_meta($post_ID);
}
Displaying the “other language excerpt” is done in this simple-but-not-too-elegant way:
<?php
$post_other_excerpt=get_post_custom_values("other-excerpt");
$the_other_excerpt=$post_other_excerpt['0'];
if($the_other_excerpt!="")
{
if($the_language=="fr")
{
$the_other_language="en";
}
if($the_language=="en")
{
$the_other_language="fr";
}
?>
<div class="other-excerpt" lang="<?php print($the_other_language); ?>">
<?php print($the_other_excerpt); ?>
</div>
<?php } ?>
accompanied by the following CSS:
div.other-excerpt:lang(fr)
{
background-color: #FAECE7;
}
div.other-excerpt:lang(en)
{
background-color: #FFF;
}
div.other-excerpt:before {
content: " [" attr(lang) "] ";
font-weight: normal;
}
Now that we’ve got the basics covered, what else can be done? Well, I’ve got some ideas. Mainly, I’d like visitors to be able to add “en” or “fr” at the end of any url to my weblog, and that would automatically filter out all the content which is not in that language — maybe using the trick Daniel describes? In addition to that, it would also change the language of what I call the “page furniture” — titles, footer, and even (let’s by ambitious) category names. Adding language sensitivity to trackbacks and comments could also be interesting.
A last thing I’ll mention in the multilingual department for this weblog is my styling of outgoing links if they are written in a language which is not my post language, using the hreflang attribute. It’s easy, and you should do it too!
Suw (who has just resumed blogging in Welsh) and I have just set up a “Multilingual blogging” channel on TopicExchange — please trackback it if you write about blogging in more than one language!
A major engineering school in French-speaking Switzerland (Lausanne) has opened a blogging platform for all students and staff.
The EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) has set up a blogging platform for all students and staff.
The platform is home-cooked, Java-based, and still in early stages. Trackback and external comments have not been implemented at this stage because of potential spam problems. Their archiving system is in my opinion a little basic, but the blogs all have RSS feeds, so I think there is definitely hope for the future.
I blogged about this in French yesterday, but I think it’s significant news enough for me to mention it again in English. (Plus, I’m thinking very hard about the implication of being a multilingual blog with monolingual readers…)
L’EPFL offre des blogs à ses étudiants!
L’EPFL offre des weblogs à ses étudiants! C’est assez notable pour que j’outrepasse la limite de un billet par jour que je me suis fixée post-BlogTalk afin de préserver mes mains. Dire qu’on s’étonnait lundi quand je répondais qu’il n’existait pas de fournisseur de solution de blogging suisse! Il y en a désormais au moins un, même s’il s’adresse à un public limité.
Fils RSS et catégories pour tous les weblogs, c’est bien. Permaliens pour les articles qui n’incluent pas le nom du weblog (http://blogs.epfl.ch/article/xxxx), moins bien.
Commentaires, bien — pas de trackback, moins bien.
Mais franchement, chapeau! Je suis épatée. Très très bel effort. Qui est à l’origine de cette initiative? Qui a développé la plateforme? Je serais vraiment ravie de rentrer en contact avec ces personnes.
Mise à jour 19h30: il s’agit du KIS de l’EPFL.
Pour les étudiants de l’EPFL qui se trouverait à lire cet article, je suggère deux ressources que j’ai mises à disposition:
This blog is now powered by Wordpress.
There we are. This weblog is now run by WordPress. I have a lot to write about the migration, but I am not really in a state to do so now (just look at the time).
A few loose ends need tying up, so if things seem to have disappeared, not to worry: they’ll be back shortly.
Delicious is an online bookmark manager. It makes it very easy to add and categorize bookmarks, as well as share them with other users. You can also extract your bookmarks from delicious and integrate them in your blog to create a linklog. When I say ‘easy’, I really mean it!
Now, why on earth didn’t I start using delicious ages ago, when I first stumbled upon it? Maybe it didn’t look pretty enough, and didn’t flaunt its features loudly enough for me?
A couple of days ago I paid delicious another visit. See, somebody on #joiito mentioned my Keeping the Flat Clean post, and I suddenly found there was a bunch of people from delicious visiting that article. I thought: “My, people are actually using this thing!” and signed up for an account.
So… what does delicious do? It allows you to easily add pages you visit to your bookmarks, using intelligent bookmarklets (two clicks and no typing to add a link if you want to be minimalist). This is already easier than what I have to do to add links to my LinkBall.
You can categorize your bookmarks very easily by typing words in the “tag” field of the bookmarklet. No need to define categories — delicious takes care of it all for you. You can then view your bookmarks by category or (and this is where it gets interesting) all the bookmarks marked with a same tag. Each bookmark in your list is one-click editable, and each bookmark in somebody else’s list is one-click copyable. For each link, you can also view a list of all the users who have bookmarked it.
Does it stop there? No. All the bookmark lists (by user or by tag) are available in RSS and can be subscribed to within delicious. As a user, you have an Inbox which aggregates the feeds you have subscribed to. You may subscribe to a “user feed” or a “tag (category) feed”. On top of that, bookmark lists are available in plain html, and many users have contributed various hacks which can help you integrate your bookmarks with your weblog. (Update 02.06.04: one thing you shouldn’t do, though, is simply include that HTML feed with a PHP include or an iframe, as this will cause the delicious server to be hit each time somebody views your page.)
If you aren’t a user of delicious yet, you need to go and register right now.