Webliographer Has Arrived

Webliographer is, to the best of my knowledge, the first web-based application for managing and sharing bookmarks. The first usable version was in use in October of 1998. It replaced my home page, which consisted primarily as a set of categorized links. I was especially proud of the fact that it tracked the use of URLs, so when you clicked on a link a counter was updated in the database and links that got more hits were promoted to the front page of Webliographer's display. Though I used, and still use, Webliographer primarily for my own purposes an individual, my target audience for Webliographer was primarily teachers who wanted kids to use the web in their classrooms.

At that time, the most tech-savvy teachers (that I was working with, anyway) would use Netscape's bookmarks to collect links and them copy the bookmarks.html file, via floppy disk, to each of the computers in their classrooms. With a bit of training, Webliographer allowed them to immediately make a bookmark available on all of their machines---without knowing HTML and without having access to a web server. The teachers loved it. Look at this quote:

[Webliographer] is one of the few things that I have run across in my teaching and internet and in software that will that makes a huge, huge tremendous difference in my time, in my life and in my teaching kids, because [the links are readily available for my students].

Now, as it turned out, that group of teachers didn't really use Webliographer. They used the links that I added, but I think added very few (none?) themselves. Subsequent versions got easier to use, though there was still a bit of a learning curve. I've still got a handful of schools who seem to be using it regularly. It still has a small, but devoted following. A few teachers set up a new Webliographer for each course that they teach.

Today these bookmark sharing applications are fairly ubiquitous. Del.icio.us, Furl, Chipmark, to name a few, but there are probably at least a dozen. Webliographer, which hasn't had any significant coding done in nearly 5 years, has fallen a bit behind. I first looked at Del.icio.us some months ago. I didn't quite get it. And though there were some things that made del.icio.us nice, I liked Webliographer's format much better.

Outside of a few conference presentations I've never published anything about Webliographer. I think it has to do with the fact that most of my mentors do stuff that looks like experiments. What I'd done was really just make a toy, a cool toy, that people liked, and helped them to use the Internet in their classrooms (or their living rooms, for that matter). I still haven't figured out how to write it up in a way that I think people should care about.

Then, yesterday, a student came in who will be doing some work for me and one of the things I intended to have him work on was doing some updates to Webliographer. In particular, I thought it'd be cool to have an RSS link for the X most recently-used links (a feature that del.icio.us does not have), I also wanted to make Webliographer's means for sharing links between different "Webliographers" easier (something that del.icio.us does much better than Webliographer).

As I looked more closely at del.icio.us to get some ideas for how better to re-design Webliographer I started to think that del.icio.us was already so far ahead of Webliographer that it just wasn't worth it. I've stuck del.icio.us RSS feeds on my Moodle course page, my Google Personalized home page, and my Firefox personal toolbar. Oh well, maybe it's time to let it die (though I have no reason to quit hosting it on my server).

But then it happened. I started getting a bunch of emails notifying me that Webliographer was misbehaving. (I wrote it such that whenever it does anything that might generate any kind of database error it sends me an email. The fact that I get so few emails that I haven't disabled this notification feature speaks to how good the code is, if I do say so myself.) So finally I looked, and guess what? It was Webliographer spam! Somehow, some script, (or some human?) had managed to request an account, create a webliographer and stick in a bunch of HTML pointing to some site for the purchase of some pharmaceutical! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Anyway, if you have ideas for how and whether Webliographer should move in a new direction or how, and where I might write something publishable about it, I'd be happy to hear from you.