alex de carvalho

Thanks to Fred Wilson’s instructions on setting up a delicious thingy for Typepad, I’ve set up "Stone Soup", a linkblog to track my daily bookmarks at del.icio.us,
the url tagging site. Over the last 8 months I’ve tagged close to 800
sites, which works out to about 3 per day.  My 380 or so tags can be visualized as a tag cloud at Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 service.

Since I tag nearly everyday but only post a couple of times a week at most (and I’ve been mostly absent for the last two months from this blog … call it "blogger’s block"), a linkblog makes more sense rather than appending the links to this blog, as Fred has done.

Incidentally, Fred’s instructive post about Web Services Rules To Live and Die
By should apply to social networks in particular:

• Allow the users to easily get all of their data out of a web service anytime they want.
• Don’t hold users captive and let them remove themselves from the service.

I was easily able to export my data out of delicious and into Yahoo, by way of backup and also to quickly visualize my tags universe. Other services, including extispicious, render tag clouds as well but may not include the collaborative element of Yahoo!, where you can see your friend’s tag clouds.

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What’s a stone soup, you ask? Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

The fable of the stone soup is about co-operation amid scarcity. 

According to the story, some travellers come to a village,
carrying nothing more than an empty pot. Upon their arrival the
villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the
travellers. The travellers fill the pot with water and a large stone,
and place it over a fire in the village square. Asked what they’re
doing, they reply that they are making "stone soup", and request a bit
of garnish to improve the flavor. Additional villagers come by, each
adding more ingredients. Finally, a delicious and nourishing pot of
soup is enjoyed by all.