by Andy DeSoto on July 31, 2008
At long last, we have a new Delicious. Faster, more accessible, and better designed, the redesigned and renamed social bookmarking champion is no longer a vision of the future but an establishment of the present. I’m not going to cover the launch here– if you’d like to read more, check out ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch’s excellent coverage– but rather, address an issue that’s remained relatively unchanged with the 2.0 iteration: tagging.
Tagging is a cornerstone of Delicious…
It’s safe to say that the tagging plays a large role in the Delicious framework. As one of the main navigation tabs besides “Bookmarks” and “People,” it’s clear the Delicious designers expect tagging to be well-utilized and well-loved.
When tags were released in early 2007, Mashable wondered if users would bother filling in tags. It seems they have, even if they do so grudgingly; Delicious features thousands upon thousands of dutifully-entered tags.
[click to continue...]
by Andy DeSoto on May 30, 2008
A few weeks ago, in a comment on this blog, Lars Teigen introduced me to Secondbrain, a content management tool to “collect, organize, search and share all your web content in a single library.” Whenever the Founder and CEO of such a service takes the time to comment on your blog, it behooves you to check it out, and that’s exactly what I did.
I’ve been using Secondbrain since May 13 and have been pretty pleased with the experience, logging in every once in a while to see what’s new in the community. As the number of social networks and services increases daily, it’s aggregation tools like Secondbrain that will make the internet navigable, many have said, and I’m inclined to agree.
Compared to what some call the reigning competitor in the aggregation arena, FriendFeed, Secondbrain enjoys some unusual twists. Some of my favorite features include:
- the ability to organize and label your content into “Collections”
- a UI that’s easy on the eyes without looking bare
- a greater emphasis on tagging (e.g., in navigation)
Overall, I’ve been enjoying the service because it doesn’t overwhelm me like FriendFeed can. I can look at the stream of updates and breathe deeply, rather than begin to panic. And I like that.
I’ve been filing my Secondbrain content into collections analogous to the ones on this blog on a semi-regular basis. If you enjoyed this post, you might want to look into one or two of these collections for more goodies:
Check back every once in a while for more, or, even better, sign up for the Secondbrain Beta and friend me!
by Andy DeSoto on May 5, 2008
Is it just me, or does it seem impossible to meaningfully tag a new batch of Flickr photos? Websites tout tagging and related features as the backbone of the “semantic web“– but it seems to be that nobody knows how to tag images correctly. Not even the folks at Flickr.
I navigate to Flickr’s help page on tags and what do I get? A pretty useless help page, defining tags, explaining there’s a limit of 75 tags per image, and linking to two discussions from 2004.
[click to continue...]
