del.icio.us has been fixed to remember the actual posting date of an item, so the Be The Coolest bookmarklet won't work any more (the system still lets you set a posting date for an item so that it shows up in the right order in your store, but the list of users who bookmarked an item is in the real posting order, as it should be). Now you can actually use these lists to work out who spots the most interesting items first.
For example this table, the result of reading the del.icio.us popular page and calculating who posted the most interesting items earliest:
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If you podcast the results every week it could be like the Sunday U.K. Top 40 radio show, except it's links not songs. Cool!
Yeah, maybe I could get Mark Goodier in to read out the text of each page.
The list needs work though: it gives too high ranking to users who've just recently bookmarked lots of the currently popular pages.
This is brilliant. Maybe you could adjust the score based on their ratio of original-to-tired links. If they post lots of crap, but then one great thing, you don't want to rank them as high as someone completely original.
I've changed the algorithm again: it seems a bit better. I can't do much more though, unfortunately, without scraping hundreds of pages. At the moment, it might be that this table mostly just tells you the users that read del.icio.us/popular the most compulsively.
Vee-e-e-ry interesting.
I'm beginning to suspect you have too much free time ;)