philgo

When trying to identify early influencers and pool of knowledge around a certain topic or industry, finding early poster/commenter is one simple trick often used. Not very complex, but it often leads to other links and users and help shape how the information started to spread. Backtweets is great to see who shared a link on Twitter (despite the limited timeframe available), but Delicious gives a very different type of results and the ability to research much older content to see who picked up on it first.

Delicious

I am (still…) an heavy user of delicious. By clicking on the number of persons who shared a link in delicious, you access the bookmark history page. On top of this page,the ID of the first user to share this link is displayed and the date when he shared it. It also gives you a basic timeline to look at to see when the url popularity took off. Despite a clear drop in popularity, there’s quite a bit to be said about the usefulness of the data in delicious. Something to try…

Note : Because Delicious development has been pretty stale (cough) lately, I find myself using Diigo more and more. My favourite feature is the ability to create private groups to share links with clients and partners on specific topics and projects. Main problem is that I still search for links in delicious and the auto-tagging feature is not as relevant as there is less links shared on Diigo…

I’ve also recently found out about a new startup in Montreal called Wajam offering the same kind of bookmarking tool, but haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet.

Tagged: free, influencers, orm, posters, timeline, twitter, url popularity, web