Tracking comments with Delicious.com

I’ve been using the social bookmarking service Delicious.com for more and more things recently, very few of them related to traditional bookmarking. I’m planning to write more about how I use it as I think it illustrates a lot of interesting things about the underlying technology of the social web, but for now he’s a quick one, inspired by a post by Dave Briggs.

One of the things I’ve never managed to crack is how to keep track of all the comments I leave on various blogs, forums, newspapers, etc. There’s no standardisation (some have RSS or email updates for comments but many don’t) and while many solutions have been attempted (the latest candidate seems to be Disqus) they never seem quite comprehensive enough so I’ve preferred to keep things in house.

My previous solution was to have a folder in my browser bookmark toolbar and to drag pages into it when I comment on them. Simple, but all that data is just sitting there doing nothing. Indeed, I had to delete most of the folder every so often to keep it manageable. Not ideal. Not to mention it being a step that wasn’t a natural part of how I move around the web. I do, however, use Delicious.com a lot, so I devised a system which works like this:

After leaving a comment I select the text I wrote and click on the Delicious “Tag” button (Install it from here). This automatically populates the Notes field with my comment. I then add the tag “comment” and save:

Since I tag all the pages I comment on with the same tag I can filter them from all the other bookmarked pages.

That’s all nice but what else can I do with this data? Luckily Delicious provides RSS feeds for pretty much everything so I can take those bookmarks and at the very least display them elsewhere. So using the simple WordPress plugin Inline Feed I threw together a page on my blog which looks like this:

And to prove how simple it is, here’s the code. If you can even call it “code”.

Finally we come full circle. Using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks function to subscribe to the Delicious feed I can access a list of pages I’ve recently commented on directly from the toolbar.
(You can also do this in Safari and I believe even Internet Explorer.)

Sure, there’s no notification of new comments and I have to click through each one (meaning it still feels like a pre-RSS system) but it brings tracking comments inline with the rest of my bookmarking activity, allows others to follow my conversations should they see fit and despite my years I still get a little tingle when the toolbar automatically updates. Feels like magic.

How do you keep track of comments you leave about the place?