Tag, your IT
Things are getting serious with these web 2.0 companies. IT News mentions that Yahoo has purchased del.icio.us as they have already with Flickr. Back in September I did have a look at social bookmarking using Furl. Today I registered a del.icio.us account and give it another look in. It integrates nicely into Firefox and Thunderbird on my computer with an easy to install extension.
Most social systems on the Internet are now making an increased usage of tags to classify their contributions with freely chosen keywords. Social bookmarking has an enormous potential beyond just storing and sharing Internet web bookmarks as these 'tags' can now also be used to quickly access, analyse and surf their collective contributions. This practice is also called folksonomy (a portmanteau word combining "folk" and "taxonomy").
Here are two dynamic, visual illustrations of the potential of browsing these tags.
- Del.icio.us is a popular new tool for sharing bookmarks. Using this powerful Java Del.icio.us Graphical Browser users can now display all the connections and surf the links between the different tags used.
- Because users that publish photographs on Flickr can also add tags to classify their images, you can also also use the Flickr Related Tag Browser to surf the different Flickr tags posted.
The links between these tags is determined by their association with other tags and an analysis of their clustered usage.
Although there are some shortcomings to this system of classification, I have taken the trouble over the past month to add tags to all my new LiveJournal blog entries and Flickr image posts.
Do you tag your contributions to the blogosphere?