Tuesday, July 03, 2007

import your Google bookmarks into del.ico.us!

There are plenty sites explaining how you can export your del.ico.us tags, for example to Google Bookmarks, for instance: http://blog.persistent.info/2006/10/import-your-delicious-bookmarks-into.html
(or export your Del.ico.us tags using the Del.ico.us tool in 'settings' and then import them in Firefox or Google).

But what if you want the contrary Google Bookmarks -> Del.ico.us ?
First of all, why would you do that?
Well, despite of Google offering a richer indexing of your bookmarked entries, Del.ico.us has a number of advantages:
* Del.ico.us is really oriented toward massive tag sharing, so it really helps other people to find out good pages semantically.
* Del.ico.us really uses tags as a plebiscite system to rate the page quality of a page
* Del.ico.us gives nice JSON and GET API's allowing developpers to build semantic mashups based on social tagging.

so now you know why, here is the how to import from Google Bookmarks to Del.ico.us
1) login to your Google bookmark account.
2) go to that link: http://www.google.com/bookmarks/bookmarks.html
and save that html file somwhere on your disk.
3) now login to your Del.ico.us account
4) go to 'settings' on the top right of the page. Now select: 'import / upload' in the middle of the page.
5) now just select the file you saved from Google as the file to upload. Also you probably want to removed the 'imported' tag that's going to be added by default but that's up to you. Uploading might take some time; just come bac to your bookmarks after a minute...
6) finally, sadly Del.ico.us won't share those uploaded tags with other people. That's probably because they want to ensure the quality of the tagging before sharing any tag. So unfortunately, you would now have to share your tags one by one using the buttons in the tag list. Any javascript Firebug hack to automate this would be very welcome.

That's it folks! Keeping in sync Delicious and Google Bookmark in some way might be great.