Search Sense

Finding out if pages on your site have been tagged on del.icio.us provides an excellent metric for measuring how useful your site is to your users. With the assumption being if they are tagging it, they are loving it!

You can check if a webpage has been tagged in delicious by visiting del.icio.us/url and typing in the webpage you want to check. The results show which pages have been tagged, by which users and using what tags. A RSS feed is also provided so that you can get notifications of when a particular page is tagged.

This information is great as it allows you to understand which pages are being useful to your website’s audience, but it’s only possible to manually check whether individual pages have been tagged. Del.icio.us provides no way to automatically check every page on a website.

Using Yahoo Pipes, however, we have created a tool that can check an entire site for del.iou.us tags, and provide an RSS feed to alert when new pages are tagged.

The pipe can be found here. Due to some of the limitations of yahoo pipes it will only work on sites that have fewer than 1,000 tags. For example it won’t work on bbc.co.uk.

We hope you find the tool useful - if you have any questions on how it works please send us an email or leave a comment below.

There’s still a huge amount of technical language surrounding web 2.0, including the phrase itself… This week I had to present my thoughts on the future of digital to a large group of senior executives at a European airline. I decided that APIs (application programming interfaces) really translate into the new Aggregators of Personal Information. Once viewed in this way we start to look at our own data assets in a different and more human way. I think that leads to excitement, engagement from the marketing mind, and ultimately engagement of people’s attention.

It’s been a long week, that’s it for today.

dConstruct breaks out of talking about door handles (last year into a packed auditorium of web-savvy developers, designers and social media evangelists.

Tom Coates, a part of the Yahoo! Brickhouse team built his talk around the ‘web of data’ - data becoming more user-centric, more connected, and more useful… I am a fan of this way of understanding the rapid changes all around us in digital… Tom kept it fresh by declaring that ‘Your product is not your website’ - it’s anywhere where your brands reaches in the network. Network applications build instant connectivity via API’s, 90% of twitter activity is through APIs. Flickr is everywhere too. ‘The product… goes everywhere the network goes..‘

This fits well with how at Spannerworks we have been articulating how brands now live in networks and how they must adapt to a marketing world where we are fast moving away from channel control to evolving your brand in networks. Challenging big brands to make their data available, let their customers play with it and collaborate with other brands, for example to build a useful body of data needs scale, and lots of it.

Media owners should inherit the new world. Great content, data scale, ready built communities and recognisable brands (not always a positive thing) connected to networks in any way a user wants should make hay today. So, whoever your data curator is, promote them to head of interactive and the job’s a goodun..

Last week was pretty exciting for Spannerworks’ Content & Media team, with the launch of the first Social Space for one of our clients. It was also announced to the world that Spannerworks has recruited two journalists, a fact that has caused a small ripple of discussion. (more…)

What a month… June has certainly kept the Spannerworks team busy. Our 10th anniversary celebrations started with a fantastic client party on Tuesday night in London. If you were there, thanks for coming and we hope you had fun. You can spot yourself in the snaps taken on the night on our Flickr page.

Spannerworks’ 10 years of experience means the team is in demand. June seems to be the month of choice for marketing events and the speaking invitations have been flying in…

Antony Mayfield, our head of content and media, nears the end of his summer roadshow with presentations at the Revolution Forum, NMK Forum, PR Week Summer Forum and yesterday’s Econsultancy What’s New in Online Marketing conference. You can also catch Antony at the upcoming IAB Engage for Branding conference on 26th July 2007.

Paul Doleman, our Head of Paid Search and CTO, has been sharing his knowledge at webinars and online marketing events for the finance world. Joined by our Head of Natural Search, Nilhan Jayasinghe, together they are teaching eager audiences how paid and natural search campaigns can and should work together. 

You also may have seen us at this week’s NMA Online Marketing Show. We exhibited and our Head of Business Development, David St John Tradewell, gave a seminar on universal search. Our stand was very busy and we look forward to catching up with everyone we met. 

On top of all of this, we are really excited to launch our Social Spaces programme this week. 

Phew. We’re all off for very quick nap before we leap in to the next ten years…see you there!