Semi-private bookmarking in del.icio.us

Jon Udell has information on how to create semi-private bookmarks in del.icio.us and how to create such bookmarks for others.

Kudos to Alex Bosworth for figuring out a clever way to save bookmarks semi-privately in del.icio.us. It took me a moment to sort out how this works because it depends on a feature I didn't know del.icio.us had: the ability to tag an item for a friend. I could find no documentation on this, but eventually guessed correctly that if I want to tag this page for Stephen O'Grady, I can use the tag for:sogrady. Now it's listed at del.icio.us/for/sogrady, but only Stephen can view that page.

Alex's insight was to create a del.icio.us account, private.bookmarks, along with a bookmarklet generator that produces an account-specific bookmarklet. That bookmarklet invokes a script, on his server, that runs as private.bookmarks. When I use it to bookmark this page, it adds the page to for:judell, which means I can see it at del.icio.us/for/judell but nobody else can. Except for the owner of the private.bookmarks account, which is one reason why I call this a semi-private scheme. The other is that everyone's semi-private bookmarks are pooled at del.icio.us/private.bookmarks. [more]

via Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed, who suggests using this to provide individualized resources for students.

mnemonic technologies | social bookmarking | teaching | teaching resources