I have started using del.icio.us to collect examples of cows in art. Whereas with Famous Cows and Cow Games, which I compiled using browser bookmarks and straight to html, del.icio.us lets me collect them a little more efficiently and have rss feeds published as well. I have used the Description field to record the title of the work of art and the Extended field to record the artist’s name. One day, I would like to ‘catalogue’ them better using far more detail (date, breed of cow, etc.) in xml or something, but this is a far easier way to get a list like this done. It’s a good experiment anyway.
http://del.icio.us/rss/aurochs/cows+art is a general feed of cows in art with the tags cows and art; http://del.icio.us/rss/aurochs/cows+art+sculpture is the same narrowed down to 3 dimensional works, i.e. sculpture.
Suggestions to be added are always welcome. Try to find a large image, preferably from a gallery (rather than a saleroom or poster site which might disappear), and preferably with some explanatory content. I would normally link to a page with text, rather than just the gif or whatever. For instance, the background information I found on the Wall Street Charging Bull after wading through a million souvenir sites, adds a lot to the piece. Add a comment or email me.
You’re on drugs. 🙂
del.icio.us does other relatively cool stuff through the API, so there might be a way of doing closer categorisation; in fact, you could just implement breed and date as tags, I suppose…
The weaknesses of delicious as I see it are the limited number of fields you can use without abusing it in some way and the single word tags. These are strengths for a system intended for mass consumption, which is fair enough, but limit the amount of metadata and useful (and especially controlled) vocabulary you can use. It’s still bloody cool, and hopefully won’t fall down as much as the profiles do on my work version of Mozilla, which periodically chucks my bookmarks in the bin.