Linky linky
There’s almost too much to see on the Internet if you sign up for del.icio.us. It’s a social bookmarking system - that is, it allows you to record details of web sites you like, with tag words identifying the site topic, which are then added to the preferences of others to create an instant index of web content by popularity or interest area. So what, you say – well, I have found the Internet suddenly getting a lot more interesting, and it’s getting easier to find good content, because of the interconnectedness of everything. As well as this, it’s a good way of having your bookmarks with you wherever you go, and making sure you never lose a link to a site that might not have seemed important enough to bookmark but ended up being something you wanted to see again. My most recent del.icio.us bookmarks are below my links on the right of this page.
Del.icio.us uses tagging to allow users to find the content they need. Tagging is now being used in most major community-based web applications including Flickr and YouTube. Tagging is nothing more than adding individual key words to web content by which you can classify it. Meta keywords have been sat invisibly in the top of web pages almost since the start of the Internet, but now users are being encouraged to tag their own content, something inconceivable five years ago when I think I would have argued that users would never go for tagging content with meta data – too technical. Nevertheless it’s working, and not only is it working, it’s providing an incredibly effective way of aggregating related content from multiple media and locations in a process that is driven by content consumers. Everyone is becoming web nerds whether they like it or not. Except for my aunt who won’t touch a computer after she’s left the day job and doesn’t really see the point of it all.
Highlights found in the last no time at all include the pxn8 online photo editor, which edits pictures and can automatically upload them to Flickr for you, and Bugmenot which provides user names and passwords for various web sites so you don’t have to sign up to access content. Sites with links to lots of good things include Boing Boing and Lifehacker. I’ve also just downloaded a brilliant mashup CD – mashups, for the uninitiated, are music with lyrics from one song set to music to another, like Killers singing Mr Brightside to the music from the Clash’s Rock the Casbah – and found the Nova science podcast from PBS. Del.icio.us features a tag cloud, which shows the most popular content using simple words.
Now I need to go outside and do something constructive with my time.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
