(The quality of the above screencast might depend on your bandwidth. All links mentioned are in the following text as well.)

1. Get Greasemonkey.
   If you haven’t heard of this Firefox extension (or still don’t see why you’d even need to switch to Firefox!) check out a previous posting on Greasemonkey
2. Install the Del.icio.us MP3 userscript.
   Like lots of userscripts, this is a “Greasemonkification” of an already existing javascript, in this case the “Del.icio.us Playtagger“, that lets webmasters insert an inline Flash player automatically for every linked MP3 url:
   
3. The result: on any webpage with linked MP3 links, the power of Greasemonkey makes the inline player appear, exactly like in the playtagger examples. Now you can listen to the audio right away, and decide whether you want to have it on your MP3 player for off-line listening. If so, click the “tag this” button and save the MP3 link to del.icio.us like you would do with any other link – use e.g. the tag “tolisten” as a reminder (analogous to the often-used tags “toread” or “toprint” in del.icio.us :-) ).
4. Now filter your del.icio.us account with the “magic” tag “system:filetype:mp3″:
   
   Not only you have the list of all your mp3 files, the corresponding rss link http://del.icio.us/rss/<username>/system:filetype:mp3 under the icon will be a full-fledged podcast (= with mp3 enclosures) you can feed to your podcatcher (=podcasting client).
   You do not need to assign this “system” tag yourself in order to be able to filter on it – Del.icio.us infers them from the file extension – did you know del.icio.us has similar tags for video, images and documents as well?
5. By refining your selection with your own tags (such as “tolisten”, or “jazz”, or “interview”, whatever), you create your own shareable playlists.

Update October 23d:

• Jon Udell’s referral to the screencast reminded me of another trick to collect a series of loose MP3 links on a page in one swoop: see Jon’s screencast on how to use the Webjay page (and bookmarklet) for this
• I replaced the self-hosted flv video file with a version hosted by Revver. I have been comparing video sharing sites to host screencasts, and I’ll post my evaluations soon.

[tags]del.icio.us, mp3, podcasting, greasemonkey, lifehack, audio, screencast, syndication, inlineflashplayer, playtagger, inline+flash+player[/tags]

Even with an RSS reader like Bloglines (that treats recurring URLs as one RSS item) the same URLs will show up as new again when submitted by another user with different tags. A frustration that obvious, it just had to be tackled by someone sooner or later, so today I stumbled on “del.icio.us filtered” (via). Now I have subscribed to an rss feed of unique links on php frameworks, instead of the unfiltered del.icio.us php+frameworks linklist. Talk about a productivity booster ;-)

There are other ways to achieve this, one I mentioned in my Linklogs Mindmap was Feeddigest’s “dupe filter” but this one is simple, no-hassle and effective. Like del.icio.us itself ;-).

Want more del.icio.us tips? Have a ook at this exhaustive list of services built on top of del.icio.us.

• pure html + javascript (that I like best)
• clickable map (collapsed state in this case, the whole map was too big)
• browsable java applet (gives an idea of the Freemind interface itself – heavy 300 kb applet though!)

I added more text and links since Friday and created a Wikipedia article stub on linklogs.  Let’s see whether the rest of the world thinks Linklogs are a subject worth as decent an entry as Blogging…

About the presentation itself:

Evaluation was mixed: a bare-bones outline (this is the original mind map) and a bunch of open tabbed Firefox windows is a bit risky as preparation.  When I lost track of the order at some moment, it became euhm… a bit chaotic I’m afraid (my apologies if you had to sit it through!). Still I’m happy at least some people got some inspiration from it.  Lesson learned: determine scope beforehand and don’t try to focus on more than 1 or 2 points in a “short” presentation (thank you Cindy).

(BTW: I must have been really hyper since I spent more than half an hour searching for my keys on leaving for Brussels  – I thought I had accidentally dropped them.  I went twice through my car and my weekend holiday luggage  on a dark parking lot…  In the end, they were still in a door lock!)

Reiterating my arguments:

• a person’s public rss feed is limited to 30 items: http://del.icio.us/rss/pascalvanhecke
• theoretically, you can screenscrape the html: http://del.icio.us/pascalvanhecke , but that would be against del.icio.us fair use (see the robots.txt file and Joshua Schachter’s mails about screen-scraping) and can be stopped by del.icio.us (see the discussion on populicio.us, another service built on del.icio.us)

From the del.icio.us point of view, that’s understandable

• every user can retrieve his or her own data in the best Web2.0 tradition and recent entries are published as an rss feed (for notification and reuse purposes)…
• but if it were allowed to query other user’s full data, the database would be leeched by the competition, and del.icio.us would loose its current lock-in (that lies in the accumulated data and the network-effect coming from the present userbase)

So the way to go was to use the api but that requires both username/pswd login for the http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all request… So if you trust me that I don’t store your password*, and take the risk of sending a (non-encrypted) password (hopefully not the same as your really important pswds!) over http… then this form might be for you:

This extra feature is on my to-do list:

• the del.icio.us export format is plain xml (<posts><post href = … ></posts>), which makes it more compact than RSS, Atom or RDF, but less readily reusable…
• an optional conversion to RSS or Atom would be handy tool for people seeking to import their linklist in other apps

Oh, BTW, it took me more than 30 seconds, but hey, I’m not a Ruby on Rails programmer…

* I do cache the fetched linklists for 2 hours however – but again, I promise I don’t have any plans with them!

Update:

I made the export tab-separated, so you could copy-paste in MS Excel… Results aren’t spread over cells as they should be however… is there a way to do this without having to save and going via the import txt data wizard?

WYSIWYG HTML editor

Most people are put off by the HTML markup in the default WordPress editor. So if you want non-technical people to use WordPress as a blog or light-weight Content Management System, this plugin can help. It replaces the WordPress “quicktags” with the TinyMCE editor. TinyMCE has the advantage that it:

• works in both IE and Firefox (see examples)
• is highly configurable (by editing the wordpress.js javascript file)
• can clean up copy-pasted MS Word Mark-up (although I noticed it’s not perfect)

Download: mudbomb.com. Normal installation procedure.
For further reference: an extensive list of webbased html editors

Update August 16

TinyMCE will be integrated into WordPress 1.6 by default

Display links, titles and description for any RSS feed

This del.icio.us plugin will do so. The plugin was written with a del.icio.us linklist in mind, but works for any RSS feed (at least the ones I tried ;-) ). The installation instructions require you to download the Magpie RSS library – I’m not really sure whether that’s strictly necessary in WordPress 1.5, since Magpie is used within WordPress itself (/wp-incluces/rss-functions.php). However, I assume WordPress uses a slimmed down version, since I could not find some of the options Magpie has. In order to correctly display French accents for example, I had to instruct Magpie to produce its output in UTF-8 (the charset of the blog it was implemented on). With the full library, this insert in the configuration section of /plugins/del.icio.us.php helped:

define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

Docs and download: Chris Metcalf’s Deli.icio.us plugin page. Comments at his blog.
For further reference: this generic “RSS link list plugin” builds further on the one I used, but uses another (and simpler: just a single-file) library – haven’t tried it though.

Show list of recent comments throughout your blog postings

Another very popular application, so there are quite some implementations: I tested a couple of them, but when I saw the screenshots of this Get Recent Comments by Krischan Jodies I knew I didn’t have to search any further.
Not only does it provide you with full formatting power and the very useful option to wrap long words at a number of characters (so they do not distort the typical narrow sidebar), it also lets you do this within the normal WordPress admin interface, storing your preferences in the database (instead of you having to edit config options in php code).

See docs and download. If you want to write a plugin yourself, its source code is probably a good starting point.

More plugins

can be found here:

• WordPress Plugin DB
• Directory on Plugin developers site
• Plugin overview on WordPress Codex
• Plugin page on old WordPress Wiki

• measures by weblog providers, such as Blogger (“Incorporated Subversion”)
• cyber vigilantism (“Simple Thoughts”)
• reputation-based filtering (Ross Mayfield, he links to an interview with a spammer btw!)
• search engine countermeasures (“Micro Persuasion”)

It’s probably search engines that hold the key here. Spamblogs are annoying, not because of their mere existence, but because you notice them: they show up in search results. Technorati is very much aware of it and tries to do its best (David Sifry’s March report):

“Part of the growth of new weblogs (30,000 – 40,000 each day) created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs – fake blogs that are…”

“…we feel that we’ve been able to capture and identify most of the spam out there, but one should note that there is definitely blog spam that we don’t catch…”

Why not lend Technorati (et al) a hand…

… and tag the spamblogs that slipped through the net. If you get annoyed by a Spamblog showing up in your Technorati Watchlist (or Google Alert, or any other search feed), report it, tag it: “spamblog” * ! You could use del.icio.us or furl, the services that are being aggregated by Technorati.

Yes, I know, there are obvious objections. If your furl/del.icio.us rss feeds are being republished, you increase the Spamblog’s exposure, and without rel=’nofollow’, even its pagerank, exactly what the spammer is aiming for. You might keep the “bad” links in another account, or another bookmarking service than you normal link collection.

Still, hunting spamblogs by tagging them as spam is a tool users have available at this very moment. And it is simple and easy to use**. For the spambusters, using the spamblog tag rss feeds in (semi) automatic blacklisting is piece of cake. And yes again, there’s the danger of having controversial, opinionated blogs ostracised by adversaries – but Technorati et al can easily outweigh spamtags against “affirmative” tags and incoming links. So let’s start!

* as suggested in my introductory post, I would limit the tag “spamblog” to machine-generated blogs – and distinguish them from “fake” or “character” blogs…
** unlike e.g. the Votelinks concept, that hasn’t taken off so far

Update 20.00h, June 1

Continuing on “outweighing spamtags against ‘affirmative’ tags and incoming links”: Pubsub, a service similar to Technorati already has a system called “Linkranks” they use to filter search feeds: see the discussion at: hyku.com. Technorati probably has something similar.
Without any doubt, blog search services like Pubsub and Technorati definitely should include in their own interfaces as well an easy way for their users to report spamblogs (like you can report spam in Yahoo of Gmail), but centralised, independent “blogspam reservoirs” such as http://del.icio.us/tag/spamblog or http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=spamblog could help all of them and would definitely be a step forward from sending an email to feedback@, which is the procedure now.

Update June 25

Adsense has an easyway now to report spamblogs that are running Adsense Ads. From Jensense:

“If you see a site violating the AdSense terms, you can now file an anonymous spam report that will get to the quality team for checking. To file a report, you simply go to the page that is showing AdSense ads and click on the “Ads by Google” (or “Ads by Goooooogle”) link. In the form on the next page, include the term “spamreport” and put in a short reason about why you feel the site is violating the AdSense terms or policies. You can also enter your own email address, if you wish, then click submit.”

Update July 13

Apparently, the idea of building a public blacklist of spamblogs on del.icio.us or other bookmarking services hasn’t taken off.
If I had given it more thought then, I should have seen why: there is no incentive for denouncing a blog as spamblog as long as blog search engines don’t use it (a chicken and egg problem: they won’t do this before some substantial amount of data has been collected ).
And even then, there’s no immediate reward for doing so. What the user wants (as I suggested at other complaints on spam blogs and technorati spam), is a simple simple “report as spam” button or link in the (web/email/rss) interface itself (comparable with the email spam buttons in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc…) so that annoying blogs or feeds are filtered from the resultset immediately. Definitely something to look forward in a next Technorati release, see the David Sifry’s comments on this blog search wish list.
So far for the idea of having a public blacklist, because I’m afraid none of the services (Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, Yahoo Myweb2.0,…) will be motivated to share its results though (the ability to effectively filter out spam being a major competitive advantage!)…

• if you know what name (or “tag”) people use for something, Google is as effective, if not more, in searching for it (let’s take “screencast“) than del.icio.us is
• if you don’t know what other people call it, you’re lost, cause there’s no standard, no common vocabulary

Jaysea, I’m not sure whether you had a look at the screencast showing how del.icio.us helps to develop a common vocabulary? I do have to admit that the way it’s demonstrated, might not be really convincing, because it’s basically tagsurfing and looking how other people have tagged a specific link after the link was already submitted. That’s something people rarely, if not never do.

However, have you tried the “experimental post to del.icio.us”? Have a look at this nice explanation and screenshot: before submitting a post, you see a list of popular tags, your own tags, and the intersection of both: the “recommended tags”. So you can learn what tags other people use, and copy them with one click!

Another nice tool to take advantage of the “social aspect” it the Del.icio.us Firefox extension. Even when you don’t want to bookmark an article or page your reading, CTRL + SHIFT + Z gives you a list of the del.icio.us postings on a URL: for me this is a quick way to check the relevance and meaning of a certain page.

Luckily, a feature of Bloglines comes in: Bloglines, as all feed readers, is originally meant to read feeds containing links from a source where every link points to the source site itself, not to external resources, like the del.icio.us links do. So it interprets multiple entries with the same link (= differently tagged submissions of the same link by multiple del.icio.us users) as updates of the same entry, thus keeping the list unique.

So in order to make the greasemonkey tag feed on del.icio.us contain unique URL’s, submit it to your Bloglines account to browse through: have a look at this preview of the greasemonkey links.