I have been thinking about the best way to mine the blogosphere for the good, new voices that are coming online every day, as well as more good established bloggers. One tool that I have not used nearly enough is the Del.icio.us “For” tag. I’m about to change that, for me and maybe for you too.
You will see that I have added a “Submit a Story” link to the Site Index in the left column. That link is a jumplink down to the submission form at the bottom of the left column. I dug into the Del.icio.us API this afternoon and wrote a form to automate link submissions. All the reader has to do is be registered at Del.icio.us, add the link and click the Submit button, and it will automatically show up in my “Links for You” list at Del.icio.us. Without the convenience of a form, users have to manually tag links. I think this way is much easier and I hope it will encourage more conversation, with both new and established voices.
The form is not hard to write, if you’re used to writing forms into APIs. The good news is that now you don’t have to. I’ll email the content of the form to anyone who wants it. Just let me know (preferably by linking to this post and sending me your link via the form as a test drive) and it will be on its way. If you really don’t want to do that, of course, you can grab it via a page source view. All you need to do is change my Del.icio.us user name to yours, and you should be good to go.
And, of course, if you have something interesting that I might want to discuss with you, now there’s an easy way to let me know.
Specifically, if you are a new blogger (say at least 10 posts and fairly active) on a topic that I cover (tech, music, family life, etc.), send me your link. I can’t promise I’ll get you to the top of blogger’s hill, but I’ll at least show you where the trail starts.
UPDATE: I couldn’t find a way to do a mass delete of bookmarks at Delicious and deleting bookmarks one by one is a pain, so I created my own form that will email me the submitted information. The link to the form is in the same place near the bottom of the left hand column.
Newsome.Org 