Vous parlez de la blogosphère suisse? [fr]

[en] Tag posts talking about the swiss blogosphere (or swiss meta-blogging issues) with blogosphera helvetica. The posts can then be syndicated to create a true multi-author metablog. This seems to me a better solution then setting up a new multi-author blog somewhere. Let's use what we already have: bloggers!

Je crois que tout le monde (ou presque) a réalisé que la blogosphère suisse commence à bouillonner. Mais peut-on parler de blogosphère “suisse”? Savons-nous ce que nos amis d’outre-Sarine fabriquent avec leurs blogs? Les frontières linguistiques sont les plus fortes que l’on puisse trouver sur le web. Pour cause, ce sont pour ainsi dire les seules.

Swiss Metablog fait pas mal de “veille blogosphérique” suisse, mais c’est en allemand. J’ai un compte, mais je ne l’utilise presque pas car j’ai déjà de la peine à suivre avec CTTS. Le blog de iFeedYou aborde souvent également des sujets touchant aux blogs dans notre douce Helvétie.

On a proposé et reproposé de faire un blog multi-auteurs et multilingue pour tenter de rapprocher un peu les différents groupes linguistiques. N’oublions pas non plus qu’il y a en Suisse aussi des italophones, des anglophones, et des toutes-sortes-de-phones.

Alors, voici l’idée: on va utiliser un tag pour identifier les billets qui traitent de la blogosphère helvète. Pour ne pas faire de jaloux, on va parler latin: blogosphera helvetica. Ensuite, on peut consulter la page du tag, s’y abonner, et même syndiquer le contenu pour en faire un meta-meta-blog quelque part.

Je crois que c’est plus viable de demander à des blogueurs déjà fort occupés de simplement rajouter un petit tag sur un billet qu’ils écrivent de toute façon pour leur blog, plutôt que de leur demander d’aller écrire le billet ailleurs.

Qu’en pensez-vous?

Précision 08.03.06: ce tag (blogch ou blogospherahelvetica, on verra) ne sert pas à identifier un billet comme étant “suisse”. Il sert à identifier un billet qui parle de ce qui se passe en Suisse côté blogs. Le public cible pour ce tag est “quelqu’un qui veut savoir où en sont les blogs en Suisse, et ce qui est en train de se passer d’important”. Regardant les quelques billets que j’ai tagués ainsi, je me demande si c’est pertinent pour chacun. Les aurais-je tous publiés dans un blog multi-auteurs portant sur la blogosphère suisse? Pas certain. A méditer…

Thinking About Tags [en]

What if taggy applications like Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us started allowing us to query multiple tags with “and” and “or” operators?

[fr] Une proposition pour pouvoir combiner les tags (comme "blogosphere ET blogosphère", "livres OU films") dans des services comme Flickr, Del.icio.us, et maintenant Technorati.

Some quick thoughts about tags, following Technorati Tagified.

So, there is “blog“. And “weblog“. And “blogs“. And “weblogs“.

How about a way to get the posts/photos/links tagged with any of these tags? Maybe something like .../blog,blogs,weblog,weblogs/.

That would also solve some multilingual problems: get “blogosphere” and “blogosphère” together on the same page with .../blogosphère,blogosphere/.

At del.icio.us, I tag the books I’ve read with “books/read“, and films I’ve seen with either “films/seen/cinema” or “films/seen” (if I saw them on DVD). This used to work fine, because a del.icio.us bug (poor me thought it was a feature) would include links tagged as “films/seen/cinema” when one asked for “films/seen“. That doesn’t work anymore.

Say I avoid messing with tags-with-slashes, and tag films I saw at the cinema with “films seen cinema” and others with “films seen dvd”. I’ll probably also have links tagged “films” or “cinema” but which are not tagged “seen”. How could I pull out a list of links tagged “films” AND “seen”? Perhaps something like .../films+seen/.

Update, 10:00: Kevin tells me “+” signifies a space in a URL. Maybe “&” could do the job instead, then? And if “&” can’t because it’s supposed to separate parameters, any other suggestions?

Update, 11:40: holy cow, Del.icio.us does this already! I’ve updated my tags and lists. See “books+read” for books I’ve read, and “films+seen” for films I’ve seen. I’m a happy bunny!

Let’s get wild, shall we? .../books-read/ could list things tagged as “books” but not “read”.

Now we only need a way to assign operation priority, to be able to start retrieving lists like “books I’ve read or films I’ve seen which are also tagged as india” — wouldn’t that be cool?

Taggy application developers, hear the call!

Thanks to rvr and GabeW for the little discussion on #joiito which prompted me to write this post.

P.S.: has anybody written that WordPress plugin yet? (You know the one I’m talking about: the one that lets you painlessly technorati-tag your posts.)

Delicious! A Great Bookmarks Manager [en]

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.