Scuttle
Everyone has heard of del.icio.us. I use it to keep track of my bookmarks that I want to share with other people. But what if I could have my own del.icio.us server? Then I could do projects with groups of people and all the tags we create would be limited to the people in our group.
To get an idea of what I’m talking about, go to del.icio.us and search for the tag: flash. You’ll get more than 182,000 links. Many of those links will connect to pages with information about Macromedia Flash, but there will be plenty of other things to sift through: flash drives, flash bulbs, flash arrests…
More importantly, most of them will not deal with Flash items that can be used in an educational environment.
I want to have a site where my students can go and enter URLs for sites that have educational multimedia activities. I want my students to put in tags that relate to these sites: arithmetic, chemistry, elementary reading, etc. I don’t want all this work to “disappear” in a sea of millions of delicious links.
Using Scuttle I have created my own delicious server. It even workings with any program that uses the del.icio.us API. It takes a few minutes to install. You download the package
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle
and uncompress it on your server. Create a MySQL database. Import the provided database table. Edit the provided profile file to include the name of your database, username and password. That’s it.
I have already setup three different instances of the scripts.  I use one for my own bookmarks. The others I use for student projects. For my own bookmark, I exported my current bookmarks from my browser and used the built-in Scuttle tool to import them into the database. Now all my new bookmarks go right into Scuttle.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:43 am
That’s an interesting idea. I could see some uses, especially if you can get a critical mass of people using it. With RSS feeds, you could pull the various categories to build custom, dynamic portal pages.
Still, I like to share links on delicious, too. There would inevitably be cases where I would want links to go to one place, or the other, or both. I’d have to think through how this would work.
It might be more helpful to have an agreed-upon default tag to use in delicious in addition to the other tags. For example, if everyone in my school district used “bbhcsd” as a tag, it would be easy to filter the links without sacrificing the ability to share the links. I wonder if there’s a way to configure the delicious plugin to automatically add a tag to anything bookmarked.
One benefit Scuttle would have, though, is that it wouldn’t be blocked by the Internet filter. It may be easier to justify allowing access to a closed community like that than to something like delicious.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I still use delicious. Scuttle and delicious both have tools that permit importing and exporting. There is probably something that could even synchronize the two (if I looked into it).
For group projects I can never get everyone in the group to play by the rules. Whenever I have specified a custom tag, too many people don’t use it and I lose people from the group. Having my own server eliminates that problem.
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:15 pm
[...] I’m a daily tagger. I blogged about Scuttle before. I setup my own server and use it for my personal bookmarks. I find it quicker to use than delicious because all the links there are mine. For class projects I have also found Scuttle to be more useful. The first time I worked with a class or 30 freshmen to build a group of links for a course, we decided all the links would be tagged with EDUC260 (the course number). Some people used EDUC 260 (note the space), so delicious didn’t associate those links with our “class tag”. Other students left the class tag out altogether. In the end, almost half of the links didn’t have the needed tag to associate them with the course. With Scuttle, I can create a separate “link database” for each class. It takes me an extra five minutes to setup. Considering the benefit, that is trivial. I have the students enter the links by going to a specific URL and all the links are grouped without using any special tags. [...]
April 27th, 2007 at 8:15 am
[...] Alvin made the point back in January that a closed system limits the number of links. If I search del.icio.us for Shakespeare, I get 6,000 links. All of these are hand picked and tagged by del.icio.us users. This isn’t like Google. Most of these links will be relevent. Even a relatively small number like 6,000 can be overwhelming. [...]
June 26th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
[...] is included but not Google Scholar. Anyone else using a web 2.0 application with students? I use Scuttle for class work, but point student to del.icio.us for personal [...]
September 12th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
I’m very happy to use scuttle script on my own site.
I add only mine favourites links and use different usernames for differents niches and themes.
Very useful site.