The Delicious Trick – Business Research

You’re lost at a fork in the road. You need to make a decision and don’t know where to start with abundant options. No worries, use The Delicious Trick.

The Delicious Trick uses the crowd sourcing of Delicious.com to your advantage. Delicious.com, or del.icio.us as it was formerly known, is a “social bookmarking site” purchased by Yahoo in 2005 and then sold to AVOS Systems in 2011. Simply put from Wikipedia-

Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone’s bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL http://delicious.com/tag/wiki displays all of the most recent links tagged “wiki”. Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.

I first used Delicious back in the day to easily archive my bookmarks in the cloud regardless of what computer or browser I was using. Most browsers have a host of plugins you can use to save and tag bookmarks.

Company, Business, Plugin, and App Research

What is the trick I speak? Say you are stepping your toes into the data mining space and you need to set something up for a client or simply need to know who the players are. You know you want something that is Linux based.

• Do a “top 10” or “best of” or “top” Google search of what you need to learn more of. In this case the query will be “Top data mining software“. It could be “top 10 e-commerce WordPress plugins” or “Best Social Media Monitoring Programs.” You get the picture.
• My query resulted in a great page – 9 of the Best Free Linux Data Mining Software. Here you will find the 9 links and normally you would go to all 9 sites, read up on them, read reviews, maybe even download, install, and play around. That could take days, even weeks depending on how complicated you get with trial and error.
• The Delicious Trick is to bookmark all of them and see who has the most bookmarked links. I’ve figured out a quick way but here’s a nugget for a would-be-developer- Delicious’ API seems relatively open and there’s probably a slick way to make an application. Simply open up each of the links in a new browser and tag, in this case I”ll tag them “datamining”. What I end up can be found here – http://delicious.com/hogpath/datamining. I had previously used the tag datamining, had even bookmarked The R Project way back, so again I have a clue that may be something to pay attention to.
• Here is what I get with the number of people who saved or bookmarked these Linux Data Mining Websites.

Based off this I just saved myself a lot of work, especially if all I need to know is where to start. I probably wouldn’t bother with Elki, but Weka and R have my serious attention. In a case like this where R blows all sites out of the water this is where I would start to focus my attention. Also coming from a web design background R has a pretty crude website and I may have devoted more time to site with a more pleasing web interface. This Delicious trick helps me make an informed decision.

Not to discredit ELKI, but 9 saves are 9 people talking about it, compared to R which has almost 7,000 people taking the time to bookmark it in their delicious account. I’ve used this technique extensively when I need to quickly get a pulse of a landscape and even in choosing platforms to use and build on.

; – )

Check me out on delicious.