A VC

Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love to spy on myself. I use last.fm to record all of my music listens and I showcase them on this blog. I use the attentiontrust firefox extension to record my clickstream and search history and I used to showcase them in the root widget. You can now follow my clickstream as a channel in the attentron software.

I don’t do this just to be an exhibitionist. I find great value in keeping track of my online activities and looking back at them to understand what I find most valuable and interesting. I don’t use the internet or any other medium in some regular rote way. I don’t use a feedreader, I follow links. I move back and forth from iTunes, to last.fm, to the hypemachine, to rhapsody when I listen to music. I read the Times in paper form some days, oneline other days, and not at all many days. I read techmeme, then valleywag, then techcrunch, then om malik, then nothing, then everything.

But over time a pattern emerges. I have certain favorite blogs (this one being my favorite and I am serious about that). I have certain favorite musicians which you can see on my left sidebar. That list is not something I made up. It’s calculated by last.fm based on my listening history. I have favorite websites.

And that’s where delicious comes in. Delicious rolled out a new feature with the release of its new firefox extension. If you select the delicious toolbar as one of your view options in firefox, you will then get the option to show recently bookmarked URLs or most visited URLs. I selected most visited. Delicious is now tracking your web visits, and showing you (and only you) the most used websites on your toolbar, there to be clicked on. Awesome, awesome, awesome!!

I found Joshua on IM yesterday afternoon and chatted with him a bit about this. I told him that within a week the “most visited” toolbar looked a lot like my firefox bookmarks toolbar. “nod” was the reply. Typically cryptic response.

Firefox bookmarks are a manual representation of the sites I find most valuable. These are the ones I’ve taken the time to bookmark and put onto my toolbar. And I have put 40 URLs into my firefox bookmarks toolbar. 17 of them are visible on the toolbar, the others are in the dropdown box. I manage those 17 actively in an attempt to keep the most valuable sites in one click territory.

My most visited list from delicious contains 13 URLs right now. 9 of them are also right above on the visible firefox bookmarks toolbar. I bet that within another week or two, they will be identical.

Then what? Do I move the ones on the delicious most visited list into the dropdown box so in my firefox toolbar I have the next most popular list?

It seems to me that delicious and firefox could take the next step and make these two lists work together in some way. Allow me to mix manual bookmarking and implicit bookmarking and display the combined results in some way that’s most useful to me.

Anyway, I think this is a big step in the right direction for delicious. I once asked Joshua why he didn’t allow voting in delicious. He said that tagging was voting. A tag was a yes and anything else was a no. Well they just added a second vote in delicious. A click is also a yes. And a lot of clicks to a given URL is a big yes.

And I am glad to see it.