If you’re not already aware, I’m a keen user of the social bookmarking service Delicious (previously known as del.icio.us). When I’m browsing the Internet and find something of interest, be it a blog post, news article or entire website, I hit the handy bookmarklet in my browser and store it for future reference.

The other beauty of social bookmarking is the ability to share your favourite website links to both your own social network and the general public.

There are three main ways of discovering the links you bookmark on Delicious:

• the Popular Bookmarks page
• a user’s profile page (or the appropriate RSS feed)
• searching for specific tags

That final one is key to the operation of Delicious and the value it has added to the search engine industry. When Yahoo! acquired Delicious back in 2005, they realised what possibilities could come from the underlying meta data users were adding to webpage URLs. Not only was the popularity of certain webpages adding weight, the descriptive tags users were applying to their links were helping search engines know what to present to users while searching.

So this brings me back to my original point - tagging.

I religously make an effort to tag all my bookmarks with as many useful tags as possible, mainly for my own purpose but also to aide other users in finding appropriate content with descriptive searches.

Strangely, I’ve started to realise a pattern in the sort of tags I use too. They normally fall within the following patterns:

• the product title or name
• topic category or categories
• the author(s)
• the source or referer
• any useful adjectives and nouns

All the tags are usually normalized too, mainly because user queries are entered lowercase but also to group multi-threaded words together. For example, “The Guardian” would become “theguardian” or “Yahoo!” becomes “yahoo“. I’m not suggesting this is the best solution to a difficult issue of standardizing tagging - it’s just my preferred method.

My motivation for this post is to see how other people prefer to tag content. Are there any “standards” you adopt or are you quite relaxed about the format you use? Do you prefer alternative methods to those I’ve outlined above?

I’d be interested to get some feedback on this.

After what seems like an age, I can finally announce one of the projects I have been pouring my time in to over the last few months. Not only was I content with working full-time at Yahoo! as well as running a fortnightly podcast, after the success of World Cup KickOff, it seemed only natural to follow this up with its European counterpart - Euro KickOff.

Next month, from 7-29th June, Euro 2008 will be kicking off in host countries Austria and Switzerland - a tournament of sixteen countries competing for the crown of Champions of Europe. While none of the “home countries” have actually qualified this time round (which I’m sure most England fans are still blaming Mr Mclaren for), I couldn’t let that dampen my intentions of delivering what seemed to be quite a popular service among football fans around the World last time round. There are still 16 countries from around Europe who will be following their teams religiously next month and would love to have a one-stop reference (and download) of the all important kick-off times.

The Team

Rather than go it alone on this project, I had a great team to work with to make sure we delivered a top quality service. Thankfully, from the success of World Cup KickOff, I had established a great friendship with Brian Suda so he was really keen to get involved and lend his hand on the technical background of the project.

I also realised it would make sense to bring in another developer on the project to spread the workload so I roped in Klaus Komenda from Yahoo! (who is also from Austria so also had knowledge of one host country too). I have worked with Klaus on multiple projects at Yahoo! and I was certain he had the ability to deliver a high-end product with super efficient code.

On the design side of the website, I asked fellow Multipacker Gareth Brown from One Black Bear to go wild and create an impressive and memorable design the users were sure to remember. I think you can agree the design is absolutely superb, bringing together the nature of the website as well as harnessing the locality of the event this time round.

The Website

So now it’s all designed, developed and out there in the open, what does Euro KickOff actually do? Well, it simply allows you to download all the kick off times of Euro 2008 in to your calendar, whether you use Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird or your mobile device.

The fixtures are accessible in the generic ICS calendar file format so should work in most calendar applications. If your software is capable of subscribing to remote calendars, you can always subscribe to the Euro 2008 fixtures so they are automatically updated with final scores as well.

But rather than stop there, we’ve made it so the user can choose which fixtures they want to follow. Rather than just make you download all the fixtures, you can customize the fixtures by a chosen team or group, the later stages, venue or date. That way you only get the matches that matter to you.

Future Plans

We still have a few plans for Euro KickOff which will be released in the next few weeks.

We are currently working on a Developer API to access the fixture times of Euro 2008, allowing other people to build their own applications.

We are also hoping to release the website in other languages later this week (it seems quite cheeky to build a service in a language that none of the attending countries speak natively).

We are also in talks with quite a significant figure in the industry who want to collaborate on the project. More on that soon.

Spread The Word

So now it’s built, what now? Well, it just needs to be used.

I know many readers of this blog are from the UK so probably don’t have a massive interest in Euro 2008 this year. But think about this - won’t it be a lot more fun to support a team you’re not emotionally attached to and see how far they will go? Why not have a bit of a sweep stake with your friends or at work, pick a team from the pot for a quid and the winner at the end wins all the donations? You could use Euro KickOff to track your team to make sure you know when they are playing and have a bit of fun in the process.

You could also arrange when to meet with friends for a bit a social event around certain games such as your team’s fixtures, opening ceremony or big final. By having all the dates and times in one place, it will be a lot easier to arrange your visit to the pub, party or even flights to Austria or Switzerland. Any excuse for a few drinks…

 

Euro KickOff has been a really cool project to work on and I’m really proud of the finished product. The entire team have excelled themselves and I’m sure they all are very proud to see their efforts all come together. Fingers crossed for an exciting tournament now…