I'm looking forward to having the chance to teach my "Mixing and Remixing information" course for the fourth time In January 2009.  Since I plan to use my book on mashups as one of the primary texts, I'm going to have to update it.  Even though the book was published in February, a fair amount has changed in the world of mashups.   As a consequence,  I plan, over the next three months before class starts,  is to document some of those changes.

Let me start with something that should be straightforward. I wrote about delicious in Chapter 14 of my mashup  book,   a chapter about social bookmarking.    Since the book was published, delicious underwent a change of name -- from http://del.icio.us to http://delicious.com.

In updating my book, I will have to make note this name change and any consequences.   My hope is that all the old URLs would continue to work.  Indeed, that is my experience during some casual testing.  For instance, the URL

http://del.icio.us/url/53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5

is redirected to

http://delicious.com/url/53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5

as one would expect.

Curiously though, the URLs involved in the delicious API are still based on the old domain name -- according to the current documentation.    Hence, all the URLs that look like

curl -u USER:PASSWORD https://api.del.icio.us/v1/tags/get

in my book are still correct.

After not had an opportunity to look at whether there are  changes in the API  that don't result from the name change -- that examination will have to come later.

If I weren't sick with a cold, I'd be energetically plowing away on Chapter 14 on the topic of social bookmarks. I'm trying to get through a first pass of the chapter this afternoon, which is likely to be way too optimistic. Fortunately, I am drawing from some work that I've already assembled:

• first of all, what I had already written in my book outline for Chapter 14, which runs about a page.
• my notes from my Moleskine notebook on March 30, 2007. (I find that writing by hand in my notebook to be extremely productive, which has surprised me.)
• notes from my wiki on the topic from a year ago (I will have figure what has changed since last year.)
  1. DailyNotes/2006/03/27/SocialBookmarking - Raymond Yee's Wiki
  2. DailyNotes/2006/03/30/SocialBookmarkingNotes - Raymond Yee's Wiki
  3. SocialBookmarkingNotesForRemixClass - Raymond Yee's Wiki
• some ideas from ~brett Brett O'Connor's book del.icio.us Mashups, which from what I can see has lots of good ideas about what you can do with social bookmarks, including, of course, del.icio.us

I have posted the first draft of Chapter 2 (pdf) "Looking at Flickr, Del.icio.us, Google maps, and Amazon.com as end-user tools". The chapter analyzes Flickr (as our primary extended example) for what makes it the remix platform par excellence for learning how to remix a specific application and exploit its many features that make it so remixable. The chapter compares and contrasts flickr with other remixable platforms: del.icio.us, Google Maps, and amazon.com.