So I love Jots, I really do. No really. I love how easy it is, how it looks, the rss feeds, etc. But after reading David Weinberger’s update on what’s in store for del.icio.us, well, I think it’s time I got with the masses and revived my very quiet account there.
Delicious is adding social networking. You’ll be able to designate people as members of your “network” so you can keep up with what they’re tagging and you’ll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups’/network’s use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences…something to look forward to.
But now here’s the problem, and yes, I’m looking for help. I’d love to be able to import my jots bookmarks into del.icio.us, but there doesn’t seem to be any google-able info on how to do that, and jots support is, to be kind, nonexistant. (Silly me.) So, I’ll ship one of my wife’s homemade pumpkin pies to the first person who can tell me how the heck to move my bookmarks. (Hey Alan, they got pumpkins in Phoenix???) And “you can’t” just isn’t an acceptable answer.
Technically it is likely possible, but its beyond my programming skills (I am really just a fake techie). Jots does have an interface where osmoene can write code to retrieve content via standard XML-RPC code (stuff flickr uses to allow you to post to a blog):
http://www.jots.com/pages/xmlrpc_api.html
where you can see there is a “method” or function:
array jots.getAllPosts(string username, string password)
Returns a list of all account posts.
There are tools that can write these programs, issue this as a command, and the data returned as a big pile of XML. Someone would then need to convert it to a format that can be inserted into del.ico.us much like the furl2delicious tool is used a few months back.
The sad lesson is to be wary of social technology that does not provide good inport/export functionality for your content.
And yes, Will, we have pumpkins in Arizona! Very popular is Young;s Farm: http://www.youngsfarminc.com/ and others listed at
http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/AZpumpkins.php
The only hitch in Arizona is to avoid carving and putting them out too early… we ‘ve been getting day time temps in the 90s and if you carve them the week before, by Halloween they look old, shriveled, and pathetic.
Boy, I wish I could help you out with this one. Nothing like a good pumpkin pie in the fall.
I did post today on a survey that was sent to me asking about what features I would like to see within social bookmarking software. You may be interested in adding your 2 cents.
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/gli/archive/2005/10/27/2246.aspx
Giving you an XML-RPC API to pull the bookmarks counts as good export functionality in my book.
Tom–So just to show how ignorant I am, how do I do that? It sounds like I could take an XML file with all of the bookmarks and use that to import into del.icio.us, but I don’t have any idea how to do that. Help!