I just discovered some new behaviour from Talk Digger users while I was analyzing the server logs. I found that some users (intentionally or not) are using Del.icio.us not to bookmark Talk Digger’s website, but to bookmark discussions Talk Digger has helped to discover.

How does this work?

1- Someone finds an interesting page somewhere on the Internet and wants to know who else is talking about it. To demonstrate, let’s take an article of the Washington Post called Bush Speaks Out for Rumsfeld.

2- They copy the URL of that web page, and then go to

http://www.talkdigger.com/?dig_url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401649.html

That way they start a search to find the discussion evolving around that piece of news, using Talk Digger.

3- Finally they copy that URL and bookmark it using Del.icio.us. That way they only have to login into their Del.icio.us user account and click on the bookmark to see the discussion they are “tracking” using Del.icio.us.

It’s great that users are sharing with the Del.icio.us community their interests for a particular piece of news (website, blog, etc) by tagging it with different tag names. Then other people from the community can save that same bookmark and start following the discussion too.

If you read my last blog posts about the future of Talk Digger and what I am working on right now, you will probably find out that this is the same idea that is behind the sort of “portal” that I am developing for the “next generation” of Talk Digger.

The purpose of the “portal” will be to help users find other users with the same interests while following a specific conversation that is beginning to evolve on the Internet. The premise of the idea is that people with similar interests will find each other by checking and displaying which users are tracking the same stories.

For now, what is really interesting is to see how users of two totally different web services can use them in conjunction to answer one their persistent needs.

Technorati: Delicious | del.icio.us | talkdigger | conversation | discussion | track | follow | web2.0 | bookmark |