Sunday, December 05, 2004

Us.ef.ul

My parents are currently visiting me but, in between spending time with them, I've also managed to do some web housekeeping this weekend.

It seems the world and his blog has already discovered the greatness that is del.icio.us, but after hearing about it for several months, I've finally registered and collated all my bookmarks on it.

For those who don't know, del.icio.us is a bookmarks management system that allows you to access your bookmarks from several computers as they are all held on a centralised server. You can categorise your bookmarks in any way you want. For example, mine include tags such as "culture", "music", "food" and "london".

Because all del.icio.us users are encouraged to tag their links, I can then search for all links relating to "japan" in the del.icio.us database and refine the search further to include only blogs written in Japan about art. And because these are sites people have taken the trouble to bookmark as their favourites, I'm less likely to come up with some of the random results I get with Google. I can also find out the most popular sites in a category, eg "wine" or "linux", and discover "politics" sites I had never heard of before.

Flickr is another social application. At its most basic, it is an online photo management system that enables people to upload and display their photos. However, if you make the photos public, any registered user can comment on any photo, making Flickr more like a mass photo blog. Like del.icio.us, you can tag all your photos and through searching on tags, eg "santa fe", "black and white" or "cricket", you can find similar photos to yours and people who like to take photos of similar subjects. Online friendships can be fostered that may or may not spill over into real life.

Here's my del.icio.us page and here's my favourites page listing the sites I visit regularly.

I've only just started uploading my photos to Flickr but haven't passed August 2004! But as soon as I have a bit more time, I'll start uploading with a vengeance. Keep an eye on the column to your right ("My Flickr") for my most recent Flickr stream. In the meantime, there's always my Photoroll on this site, which is more up-to-date.

Related links:

+ Why I love Flickr
+ Beginners guide to del.icio.us
+ Interview with del.icio.us creator
+ Nutr.itio.us extension

Other links today:

+ Ack, these are pretty ugly blogs from Microsoft Spaces.
+ The immortality debate: 'Don't fall for the cult of immortality' versus 'We will be able to live to 1,000'.
+ How to eat sushi
+ Saving Jesus. In the aftermath of the US election, the Christian Left searches for its voice.

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