Using del.icio.us collaboratively in a Basque collective weblog

This is about a section we've named Jamaika at Sustatu.com, a Basque collective weblog. Sustatu is a sort-of-Kuro5hin, culture, tech and general interest issues posted and commented by visitors, but in a quite different scale: only 0.6 million people speak Basque.

There it is: www.sustatu.com/jamaika

PURPOSE: Posts in Sustatu are like in other collective weblogs as Kuro5hin or Slashdot: they're edited and moderated, and mostly are somehow ellaborate (a summary and then some more or less lengthy paragraphs). We just wanted to add another option (easier, more straightforward) to readers and editors: a link and a comment, just a few words. Another channel for more telegraphic news items from the net: a curiosity, breaking news, an invitiation to visit a given site...

SOLUTION: We solved the issue with del.icio.us. It's simple: we invit users to add what they like to del.icio.us with a specific tag: sustaturako (for Sustatu, in Basque, a particular term that probably will not be used by anyone else, if not to let their reference be listed at Sustatu). Then we parse the RSS file of that tag's page at del.icio.us and there it is.

SOFTWARE: Sustatu.com is a Zope website and for this del.icio.us thing we added an app based in Mark Pilgrim's Feed Parser written in Python. It's cached and fed every 30 minutes, so the latest additions at del.icio.us/tag/sustaturako appear shortly afterwards at www.sustatu.com/jamaika

We announced this feature last week, and added a page with explanations. Few Basques use del.icio.us, as far as we know. So, the how-to page includes quite detailed instructions. We also encourage users to make full use of del.icio.us for their bookmarking and reference work, not just as a way to feed Sustatu.

The name for the feature is Jamaika ikusteko jaio gara, a false quotation by Bob Marley. In English it means, we have been born to see Jamaica which is just nonsense, but in Basque it has 2nd and 3rd meanings, both very funny and fitting to this feature.