Needless to say, covering that many books, their web site is gigantic, and making a good and relevant navigation system is quite the undertaking, especially to a volunteer project on a limited work force and budget. So they are considering social bookmarking services as a means for making site navigation too backed by visitor interest, knitting together what has been bookmarked and tagged by their visitors, with other pages at
runeberg.org (their site), tagged with similar tags.Before they embark on creating a bucketload of server side scripts and cron jobs to occassionally scrape social bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us or Technorati, I think it would be prudent to toss out the question of whether this is a service in the works or already provided by any of the tagging services, large or small. They already sit on the databases and are in a great position to set up a service to address this use case, which I believe has a huge potential of being a useful service to web sites of all topics and domains, all over the world, and probably one that could easily finance itself all of its own.
A quick off the top of my head sketch of a suitable mode of operation:
- Given a URL, look up all tags from all taggers for that page.
- Cross-reference those tags with other pages from the same domain, having tags in common with this page, sorted in descending order by how many.
- Provide this dataset in JSONP form for the referring page to layout as it wishes.
- For points of style, embed a permalink URL in said JSONP package to an RSS feed of this dataset, covering links for the given search criteria in the future, as and when they are added.
Readers are most encouraged to expand on the ideas and link projects, present and future, that cover similar ground.
