Simon Willison’s Weblog

Blogmarks on del.icio.us

2nd December 2004

I’m horribly ill again: having defeated the mumps I now seem to have come down with some kind of ’flu thing. Lovely. In between whinging about my state of health and watching episodes of Frasier I’ve been playing with del.icio.us as part of my research in to web annotation. The connection between the two isn’t particularly strong but it’s clear that something very exciting is happening over there.

This evening I wrote a script to import my blogmarks in to del.icio.us. I don’t plan to replace them with a feed from the site for a couple of reasons: firstly, I like to keep my data somewhere I control and secondly, del.icio.us doesn’t support my “via” fields. I will however be adding tag support to my blogmarks and some kind of functionality to ensure that anything I post to them is added to del.icio.us as well.

The problem I have now is that I’ve added nearly 1200 untagged links to del.icio.us, and anyone who has played with the service for more than a few minutes knows that it’s the tags that make it so much fun. Does anyone know of a good tool for bulk-tagging of items in del.icio.us? I’ve tried Cocoal.icio.us but unfortunately it only lets you assign tags to items one at a time; what I really want to do is run full text searches against my del.icio.us links and mass-apply tags to dozens of items at a time. If one doesn’t exist I can always knock up a custom tool with the lovely API but I’d rather not duplicate the effort if I don’t have to.