I’ve decided to collect, upload, and publish a list of the noteworthy and recommended bookmarks that I stumble upon each day — something that I should have done long ago, but was only recently motivated to do while observing how effortlessly Tara Hunt accomplished it on her HorsePigCow: marketing uncommon blog.

I’ve been aware of bookmarking services like del.icio.us for a long time, but never felt particularly motivated to use it: I’ve got my own bookmarks reasonably well organized on my laptop, have access to most of them online via Apple’s .Mac online synchronization, and never had anyone asking to share my bookmarks. But more and more often these days, I find that one of the services that I value and appreciate, in the three or four dozen blogs that I follow regularly, is their list of recommended links and bookmarks. Heck, there’s way too much information for any of us to keep up with, and one of the many filtering mechanisms that we can use is the recommendations of respected bloggers. I usually find that 90% of the recommended bookmarks and links are things that I have already seen on my own, or that I have no interest in pursuing; but the other 10% are things that I would not have found on my own, and that turn out to be quite interesting and/or educational.

The mechanism that I noticed Tara using on her own blog was so simple, and clean, and visually attractive that I was inspired to plagiarize it — not that she invented it, but I do owe her the courtesy of acknowledging that I wouldn’t have started doing this if I hadn’t seen how she did it. And it appeared that she had accomplished it with a bookmarking service called Ma.gnolia, which I had never heard of. I won’t elaborate on the details, but it does seem to have some features that the bare-bones del.icio.us doesn’t have (like a five-star rating mechanism, so you can indicate just how cool you think a particular bookmark is). I haven’t started using any of the social-networking features yet — e.g., creating groups, linking to other individuals in order to see their recommended bookmarks, etc. — but will probably do so at some point.

Meanwhile, I stumbled around the Ma.gnolia site for a while, trying to figure out how to summarize and publish a daily list of recommended links … and finally discovered that it’s actually a service of FeedBurner, which can be linked to Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us or other bookmarking services. So I set that up, which turned out to be a trivial process; and I was delighted to see, when I checked this morning, that FeedBurner had indeed picked up the four recommended bookmarks that I posted on Ma.gnolia last night, composed a summary page (with links to the recommended bookmarks, a thumbnail graphic, and a one-line summary description) and published it to the same feed that my blog gets sent to.

It’s worth noting that you won’t see this daily link-summary on the blog per se; it’s an artificial construction, and only exists as a feed service. So if you manually navigate to The Yourdon Report via your web browser, you won’t see it. Instead, you need to use an automatic feed-reader service (e.g., NetNewsWire, or modern browsers such as FireFox, Safari, or IE7). And you need to subscribe to my blog via the FeedBurner mechanism — i.e., use this URL for your subscription: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheYourdonReport. The link-summary seems to get published in the middle of the night (presumably sometime after midnight, California time), so you should see the results each morning.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve all of this, please let me know. Meanwhile, happy link-summarizing!