The CUnetwork – my Delicious/Twitter solution

I like Delicious a lot. It’s like the Internet’s version of a gated community, but one that’s open to any content as long as it meets some fairly simple criteria – it must be good enough for someone to want to bother bookmarking it with Delicious.

It’s nicely flexible too, with many uses. I ‘follow’ a bunch of interesting people to see what they reckon is worth bookmarking. The only problem is, for one reason or another, I don’t tend to visit the site very much.

Twitter‘s nicely flexible too, and also has many uses. Unlike Delicious I follow Twitter a lot (usually via Tweetie). So, what I’ve done, is plug an RSS feed from my Delicious network into a new Twitter account (using Hootsuite to do that). That way new links will plonk into the stream of updates I follow, or I can check the profile if I feel the need.

The profile’s called CUnetwork. Ta da.

I did try turning an RSS feed of these links into an email (using xFruits) but that wasn’t great. This is working better so far.

Better living through commenting

Not many people, percentagely-speaking, comment on blogs.  A bit of Jakob Nielsen research showed that:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

I write a lot of blog posts every week and it’s nice when someone leaves a comment – whether it’s someone agreeing, disagreeing, adding their own info or correcting my latest balls-up over Capsule‘s listings.

It starts at home though, doesn’t it?  Do unto others and all that.

So I’ve been making more of an effort to comment on other blogs.  Taking that a bit further, what I’d like to do is have a weekly round-up of blog posts that I’ve commented on generated automatically.  Kind of like the link-posts that many people do but slightly different.

I’ve been trying to find the best way to do that:

• Turns out Backtype isn’t anywhere near useful enough
• A fall-back option is to tag posts with Delicious and use the Postalicious plugin to round them up
• But I’ve decided to give the comment-tracking service co.mments a spin and find a way to use the RSS feed it produces to generate a weekly round-up of the posts I comment on. Easy

Although if anyone has any better ideas for how to do it then I’d be pleased to hear them.  Otherwise, hold tight for the first thrilling instalment.

**Update** – co.mments seems to have gone down so I’ve switched to coComment who I originally discounted cos they looked like they were trying to do too much.  Still, as long as they function, eh?

Still no joy automatically compiling the weekly round-up.  I’ll get there…