Turn Delicious bookmarks into recommendations with InSuggest

InSuggest, the recommendation engine I took a look at back in February, has just launched a service that scans your bookmarks to give you links for related reading. The new tool is a derivative of the Web site analyzer which would take any link you dropped in and give you recommendations of similar sites. In that case, users could add up to three sites to get more narrowed results, whereas this tool is focused simply on where you've been.

For now, it's limited to Delicious users, but if you've got an account there you can plug-in your user name and it will scan over what you've bookmarked, offering similar items by tag and link associations.

In one instance, I had bookmarked one of Smashing Magazine's wonderful roundups of WordPress themes, which pulled up several design blogs, including a companion post with a rundown of 980 themes. That's not to say the results were perfect, though--those same links came alongside a stream based on my entire bookmark library, and sorting them by tag (Delicious' preferred categorization method) can be a little overwhelming if you're a power-user with hundreds of tags.

One thing this tool does exceptionally well is help people discover bookmarks incredibly fast even if they're not a heavy Delicious user. Two of the bookmarking service's best features are that you can suggest stories to friends, as well as subscribe to certain users and keep an eye on what they're up to. InSuggest's solution is a little less cumbersome, and can be done with your user name or that of a more established user with a larger library of links. For example, here you can scope out my colleague Tom Merritt's Delicious account, which he updates every day.

InSuggest's new bookmarks feature will scan Delicious bookmarks, either yours or anyone else's, and give you reading recommendations.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[shmarya]