It seems that every idea, so great it may be, must be abused eventually. Now the time has come for del.icio.us‘s social bookmarking service. While this phenomenon was a) predictable — every ‘social’ service attracts the evil-does by nature — it b) did not hit us so far. But now, with increasing frequency, unrelated pages are tagged with ‘devonthink’ and I have little idea what we can do about it. I will need to do some research. But the amount of energy one need to put into every ‘social’ service to keep it clean seems to be endless.
Fresh tweets
I tried looking at http://delicious.com/tag/devonthink and http://delicious.com/search?context=all&p=devonthink&lc=1 and they seem OK at a first glance – would you like to send us a note at https://secure.delicious.com/help/abuse with details? We can look and see what we can do.
@Britta: Thanks for getting back to me so extremely quickly! Have a close look at http://delicious.com/tag/devonthink — I don’t think the “World’s most pierced woman” and “Sony: Sony Retro-Looking Fuel Cell Battery Is a Speaker Is a Charger” really closely related to our software. I’ll send details to your abuse dept.
I don’t think this is spam or another form of abuse. The tags are from one user (difficult). This person has tagged about 100 of her/his bookmarks ‘Devonthink’ and about 65 with ‘wishlist’. That does not look as an attempt to get a better google score by labeling ones pages with inappropriate tags. I guess that the label indicates that that person has added the bookmark or the bookmarked page to his DevonThink database.
@Arno: I have no idea what this person intends but he is ruining the idea of ‘social bookmarking’, by intention or by sheer stupidity. And it fatigues me.
Some people also use social bookmarking webapps so that they aren’t tied to one browser or computer; these tags could be to remind the user that these particular bookmarks are in DT or reference material they have in DT. I think quite a few people use social bookmarking this way… is that really “ruinous”?
@Luke: You’re right, of course. But in this case the tags are for his use only and they are of no use to others. So this use of tags is not ‘social’. You can exclude these ‘tags for private use’ from being shared with others which is what you should do in this case.