my  block

where uzairs roam

I’ve become a pretty heavy del.icio.us user (lookie-loo, my bookmarks for all to see –>). It’s wonderfully convenient having them available from any computer I’m at, and one less thing to worry about backing up; since 2000, I think I’ve lost locally stored bookmarks about 4 times. Plus, they’re tagged any way you want them, which makes them much more searchable than in-browser bookmarks. And of course, the Web 2.0 aspect of all this is that your bookmarks are immediately shareable in an easy, manageable way.

What converted me, though, was the awesome Firefox extension, which makes del.icio.us bookmarks behave exactly like in-browser bookmarks. It’ll even recommend tags based on your existing bookmarks, which means bookmarking remains an exercise in clicking, rather than forcing you to think and typing in tags. (Eww, thinking…)

So, I’m relatively happy. Except for one little thing: archiving bookmarks. I was a Digg user for a while as well, and while the juvenility (it’s a word; I checked) of the community proved irritating, DuggMirror was one of the highlights. It’s common sense, really: when you have a social news website Digg that routinely sends massive waves of traffic at unsuspecting websites, it’s a good idea to archive the page somewhere (ie, take a snapshot and store it on a different server) so that if the website goes down, you have a mirror to point people to. This is one of the things that Slashdot really missed — sure, Coral/Google/WaybackMachine archives existed, but it was always a bit of a lottery whether they would have the page you wanted, particularly if it was a news page that had just become available.

Anyway, that’s what I want for del.icio.us (they’ve got delicious.com as well if you find the punctuation irritating). I’m a pretty committed bookmarker, and oftentimes (apparently also a word…I blame Amreekans) worry about my bookmarks disappearing. The New York Times, for example, requires a password for articles older than a couple of weeks. There are also transient pages, such as expiring auctions (useful for making comparisons at a later date).

There are bound to be copyright implications, but I doubt it would be a big deal if you only made the pages available to users who bookmarked them (ie, I wouldn’t be able to retrieve pages that you archived); in that case, it would be identical to saving a copy of an article on your hard disk (which I also do…and which has resulted in a 50MB folder of HTML pages I have never accessed again).

Given the sheer number of del.icio.us users, I’m sure there’s some pretty serious Adsense moolah to be made here. Until I get time to do it (or hear of someone else who’s done it already — I honestly don’t care either way, I just want this available), I guess I’ll just have to make do with Errorzilla.