After hearing for years about social-software and folksonomy websites like del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr, I have finally jumped on the bandwagon. Okay, so the bandwagon is several miles down the road by now, but I’m making my own way in that direction.
I’m still not convinced about the usefulness of Technorati; although I’ve added tags to a few recent posts, it doesn’t seem that Technorati is picking up on them. Not that it particularly matters. I will probably end up removing the Technorati tags from Wordpress if they don’t start displaying at least some signs of utility.
Del.icio.us, on the other hand, is magic. It’s the perfect place for those random webpages that I don’t want bloating my bookmarks but that I would like to keep around somehow. It’s also accessible from any computer and any browser. In fact, I weeded my bookmarks rather extensively yesterday, saving a lot of links to del.icio.us and deleting them from my Firefox bookmarks. There are things to be said for both hierarchical organization and keyword searching, and I’m happy to have a tool for each.
Flickr is also quite nifty. At first I didn’t intend to do any more than find out what the service was about, and then I got hooked. I like it so much, I’ve even paid for a pro
account. It will make sharing photos via my blog much easier; I don’t have to do as much manual processing, and I don’t have to devote my own disk space or bandwidth to the photos. The only annoying thing is the lack of a good Linux upload client, and that’s livable. My photostream is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurabelle/; check it out.
(By the way, I have deleted my Photoblog
category, because Flickr renders it obsolete, and redirected that location to my Flickr photostream. Unorthodox, perhaps, but logical.)
It’s kind of interesting, as a librarian, to watch my own tagging habits. I am a little more stingy with tags than most (non-librarian) users, perhaps; I tend to follow the rule of most specificity (i.e. if I add the keyword WWW
I won’t add Internet
as well). Also, I have decided that I am tagging mostly for myself. While I will follow local precedent if it seems logical, I’ll tag as I think best. It is an interesting experiment, in any case.
The other site I’ve been playing with this weekend is Last.fm, a music streaming and recommendation site powered by Audioscrobbler. If you haven’t checked it out, do. Basically it keeps track of your music listening habits and develops music recommendations based on aggregate data. Now they’ve even got streaming music, so you can request a stream of music with certain tags or similar to a certain set of artists. Jeff tried it this evening, at my suggestion, and I haven’t been able to get him to leave the computer since. This is on-demand radio, and it’s great.
The other fad I’m behind on is podcasting. I just don’t get why that’s so fantastic. Is there anyone who loves it and would care to explain it to me?