Del.icio.us to CSV

Del.icio.us to CSV is a little utility that will return the Del.icio.us history of a URL as a CSV (comma-separated values) file.

There are a couple of other Del.icio.us data-mining tools out there--including the excellent Cloudalicious. One thing that's interested me while working on the book is tag order. In their paper “Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems“ Golder and Huberman found that the first tags people add are usually consistent, and thus resemble basic-level categories. So Del.icio.us to CSV spits out a file I can open in Excel to look at tag order (and anything else that's interesting).

There are some bugs: the RSS parser chokes on really large files and in some cases the full history of the URL isn't in the file (it peaks out around 500 bookmarks). I'll fix these if I can. It seems to work fine on URLs with less than 500 bookmarks.

Adam Patterson did most of the PHP programming. I changed a few details and fancied it up.

Let me know if you find it useful.