2011-03-09: Adventures with the Delicious API
I recently conducted an experiment on tags provided from the bookmarking site delicious.com . The goal was to obtain a decent sized sample set of URIs and tags that users have used to annotate the URIs. The website provides a recent tool that automatically redirects to a somewhat random URI that was recently annotated by some Delicious user. By parsing the HTTP headers I was able to grab the redirect URI and therefore build a corpus of 5000 unique URIs. The URI for the tool is http://www.delicious.com/recent/?random=1 . As the second step I needed to obtain the corresponding tags for each URI. I tried to be a good programmer and used the Delicious API to query for the tags instead of parsing the web interface. In order to use the API (v1) you need an account with Delicious/Yahoo. The request for https://username:pwd@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/suggest?url=http://www.google.com/ for example returns an XML formated response with the top five popular tags: search google search eng