Everybody wants to tag the world

November 10th, 2005

So, for the last five months or so, I’ve been trying to stay on top of the aggressively expanding world of social bookmarking (sharing cool sites with others) and RSS (gathering all the websites you go to for news, reviews, etc and bringing them alltogether in one place.) and thought I would share some of my knowledge with whomever comes here which so far includes maybe 3 people.

As far as the RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication, FYI) is concerned, its fairly simple and can be really helpful if you visit a lot of sites for content but want to be able to quickly browse through new stories rather than visit each site individually. Below is a link to my blogroll if anyone’s interested….

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/AdverseE

Now that you’ve laughed heartily at the notion that anyone would be interested in what I’m reading, I’ll move on.

There are many RSS aggregators or newsreaders out there, some which not only download text but will also display pictures, and download video and audio, podcasts, etc… if you subscribe to the feeds that deliver them. Bloglines is good but I’m currently on the search of a new reader with a more customizable interface, something where I don’t have to see the same color layout all the time. Anyway, Wikipedia has an extensive list of RSS newsreaders, both desktop and online at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators#Online_news_aggregators

Social bookmarking is really cool, too, with the most prominent site being www.del.icio.us.com . In addition to being able to save your favorites online, therefore solving the problem of ever losing your bookmarks in the case of computer meltdown and allowing those with multiple computers (work, home, etc…) the ability to access their bookmarks from anywhere, you are also able to attach what are known as ‘tags’ to the bookmarks. “Tags” are like descriptive words that give you the ability to search your bookmarks quickly and efficiently. So, for instance, tags for this site might be ‘blog’ ‘podcast’ or ‘cow feces.’ This makes it easy for you to find later on when you can’t remember what the name of my site was.

My del.icio.us bookmarks - http://www.del.icio.us/adversee

I currently use a site called Spurl that allows me to post my bookmarks into categories as well tags. In addition, I use Firefox and Spurl has a sidebar button you can click which opens up with all your categories, a tag search and three spurl-created categories of most used spurls (bookmarks), recently spurled(bookmarked) and recently visited spurls. You can set up spurl to add every bookmark to your del.icio.us account as well so you can use the tools on that site as well.

http://www.spurl.com

There are a lot of sites out there that use the same or similar setup with tagging. For instance, Last.fm is a site where you can tag music and listen to a streaming radio station that plays your favorites as well as recommendations similar to your favorites all based off of the music you add and the tags that you input to those songs.

http://www.last.fm

Wists (short for wishlists) is a wishlist creator much like the Amazon.com wishlist but for the whole web that uses tags. Any picture you find on the web can be ‘wisted’, given tags and saved from anywhere. It saves the link to the site you got it from, your tags and description and the picture. Really cool idea, I just started using it and it seems to have a lot of cool niche shopping sites on its companion shopping site, Cribcandy. (I think they mean crib as in ‘pad’ and not the baby variety.)

http://www.wists.com
http://www.cribcandy.com

43 Things, 43 PLaces and All-Consuming are sites where you can tag your goals, vacations and possessions, respectively. You can input book and movie reviews, your lifes ambitions or whatever and search on people who did the same or want the same or own the same or whatever. Then you can stalk those people and kill them. There can be only one. But, seriously, I have yet to really explore these sites but it seems like a novel idea.

http://www.43things.com
http://www.43places.com
http://www.43.allconsuming.net

Other tagging/bookmarking sites abound all over the net, you can’t throw a rock without hitting them. Wikipedia has a good description and list here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Anyway, I’ll try updating this more often as I always seem to find sites that are cool but which I have no time to try. If you’re already using any of this stuff, point me to your links so I can check out what you’ve got. Later.