Tim Yang’s Weblog

27/8/2023

Auto-post to del.icio.us from Wordpress - A bad idea

Filed under: Wordpress — Tim Yang @ 6:07 pm

As soon as I emailed Ozh about a plugin that automatically sends your new posts to del.icio.us, than I find someone has just released one. As soon as I finished reading the description, I suddenly realised what a bad idea this is. Del.icio.us will be flooded with posts from Wordpress blogs — blog spam from this plugin’s users.

3 Comments »

  1. I understand what you mean. It is true that the del.icio.us and Simpy will be “flooded” with auto-bookmarks from WordPress users, but is it really bad?

    Everyone has a right to share information and look for information he needs. Public bookmarking services are designed to handle enormous amounts of data. In fact, it is their goal — to collect and organize all that information. If you still don’t believe me, just think for a while about pinging you do every time the post is published. You kick technorati, syndic8, blo.gs and tens of other services which crawl and index your site after that. Moreover, they cache significantly more content then social bookmarkers store. So why not bring blogging closer to the people which aren’t blogging-inclined and/or not interesting in blogs as they are. They just looking for information in bookmarking systems and now we, as authors, have convenient means to automatically “submit and index” our own writings.

    That’s cool! I

    I hope you will think about it again once you get some free time and join our company of social bloggers. :)

    Anyway, Good Luck and thanks for referring!

    P.S. Otis Gospodnetić, the author/owner of Simpy, asked me to add support for Simpy a while ago, and this is how version 0.3 came to light.

    Comment by Aleksey Gureev — 27/8/2023 @ 8:34 pm

  2. Aleksey, you have given me pause for thought. Spam is probably the wrong word to describe the outcome of this plugin. Spam suggests some kind of commercial motivation. Some spammers might abuse this plugin, but I think there is a much larger issue.

    One of the problems I have with an auto bookmark submitter is that the vast majority of content on blog is trivial — either a “What I did today” type of post or a 20-word reblog post about some website the author found. So the vast majority of posts will be something that no one would normally post on social bookmarking sites. This plugin will change that. If even 10% of Wordpress bloggers have this plugin installed, when Wordpress makes a major update, the http://del.icio.us/tag/wordpress category would be flooded for days on end with really short “I just updated” posts. I can imagine the frustration of people who subscribe to that RSS feed.

    I think your comparison with Technorati and such is flawed. Social bookmark sites are not collectors of information. They are collectors of interesting information. Technorati and such are less consciously-selective. Their strength comes from the usage of their search functions. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or even simpy.com do not have search simply because they are not archives of information. The users of your plugin will do something to del.icio.us that it was not meant for.

    Comment by Tim — 28/8/2023 @ 7:47 pm

  3. Some comments about this are happening on http://blog.simpy.com/. Tim has a good point.

    Comment by Otis Gospodnetic — 30/8/2023 @ 10:57 am

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