Emak Mafu Labs Blog

As a developer you will often find yourself scouring for information, whether it be a solution to your latest nightmare, source code for the latest framework or simply something cool and so you most of you will inevitably find yourself firing-up the web browser and hitting the big G.
So let me just stop you right there, you may want to consider some other sources before trawl through x million pages of results. The most important part of your search will be where you search, and searching everything is not a good idea if your looking for something specific.
First up on the list is del.icio.us, or “the web filtered” as I like to call it. The idea behind delicious is simple, people tag links that they like so they can remember them, and find related links, however the fantastic side-effect of this is that only valid content is tagged, nobody is going to go around tagging messageboards, preachy fanboys or catchment sites because they have nothing on them. Thus a search on del.icio.us will usually give you a result that somebody thought was worth saving.
The website ffffound takes this concept one step further, you can only tag something if you are invited by a friend, and friends only have three invites each. Although strictly for images (designers) its a great concept and fantastic source of inspiration.
Of course you can still use google, who wouldn’t, but you would be better off searching Google Groups for code related stuff. Google has been increasingly gaining momentum with Google Code and the integration with groups means that a lot of developers are taking to the messageboards there.
If you like to keep on top of the all the latest information then you will want to search the “blog-o-sphere” at technorati, for all the post of all the blogs registered, or the increasingly geeky digg.com, which was here before del.icio.us, but has become slightly bloated by the number of backtracking urls and and abundance of people “digging” everything.
Finally you may want to consider some plug-ins for your browser, if your a mac user try inquisitor, find as you type functionality, and firefox has trailfire, but I’ll leave you to explore the concept behind that…..