sobriquet.net

I’ve been discovering a number of very cool sites recently, and, let’s just say, the web is a constantly changing environment. New sites pop up all the time, and plenty fall flat on their face just as frequently. One major trend on the web recently has been the so-called “Web 2.0“. Brief run down - community based sites, organising information through tagging, content syndication and sharing - all stuff that, historically speaking, hasn’t been too common, but seems to be popping up everywhere these days.

Anyway, I’m writing this because I wanted to share with you some of the sites that I’ve been using recently. Check them out, and have a play!

del.icio.us

• del.icio.us’s Homepage: http://del.icio.us
• My del.icio.us Links: http://del.icio.us/sobriquet

Yes, it’s a strange address for a website - where’s the www? where’s the .com? Well, for now, you’ll just have to trust that http://del.icio.us is actually a valid web address. Or, if you really want to know more, see an analysis of del.icio.us’s domain name.

This has to be one of the websites I can’t live without (excluding Fastmail, my main email provider, and Google). del.icio.us is a “social” bookmarking site. While traditionally, you stored your bookmarks on your home computer, and sorted them into folders, del.icio.us takes a different approach.

With del.icio.us, you instead of putting your bookmarks in folders, you “tag” them. By linking words to each of the websites you bookmark, you can place them in as many categories as you want, and find them easily later. There’s also plenty of tools to help you use and access your del.icio.us bookmarks once you’ve starting using it. If you can think of a way to use tagged bookmarks, chances are someone’s already written a tool to help you do it with del.icio.us!

Flickr

• Flickr’s Homepage: http://www.flickr.com
• My Flickr Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/sobriquet/

Flicker is a photo sharing service which uses a similar tagging system to del.icio.us. You can upload all your photos to flickr, and share them with family, friends, and other people you’ve never met! There heaps of social groups, and fun groups which people can submit photos which follow a theme. The Flickr community are often amateur or professional photographers, so there’s plenty of good photos to look at, but there’s nothing stopping anyone using the service!

Searching photos on Flickr is easy, because of the tagging system - you can search for things like beach, party, Melbourne, or almost any word!

One other great thing about Flickr is the fact that you have unlimited storage space for your photos. There’s limits to how many photos you can upload in a month, but once they’re there, there’s no limit to how many you can post!

Kaboodle

• Kaboodle’s Homepage: http://www.kaboodle.com/
• My Kaboodle Pages: http://www.kaboodle.com/rarosalion

Ever find yourself shopping for something online, and wishing there was an easy way to collate all your options in one place so you could compare them? Want to create a “wishlist” to share with your friends, but feel limited by sites like Amazon which don’t let you add things from other websites? Kaboodle does all this and more.

I was having fun recently going through Amazon’s website and adding things to my wishlist in the hope that people would buy me some of it for Christmas. I then started to think about things I wanted which weren’t available from Amazon, or that would be easier and/or cheaper to purchase in Australia rather than through an online store based in the USA. I then found Kaboodle.

With Kaboodle, once you’ve installed the buttons in your browser, when you’re looking at a page which lists something you want to add to your personal Kaboodle page (wishlist, giftlist, or whatever), you click the button, and Kaboodle does all the work for you - 90% of the time it will pick out the photo of the object, the description and price without you having to do any more work. If Kaboodle gets it wrong, or you wanted to add your own information, that’s easy too!

Google Reader

• Google Reader: http://reader.google.com

Now, I mentioned earlier that most of these sites supported content syndication. If you looked at those words earlier, and thought “what the hell is that?”, then, Google Reader might be a great way to find out. Of course, if you read those words, thought “what the hell is that, I’m not going to understand this post”, then you’re probably not reading this anyway. Bugger.

Anyway, if you find any site that has an “RSS” or “Atom” feed and you can subscribe to it’s content directly in Google Reader. That means you can read all your news, discover new del.icio.us links, view Flickr photos, etc. all in the one place! (Oh, did I mention you can subscribe to this site as well?)

Last.FM

• Last.FM’s Homepage: http://www.last.fm/
• My Last.FM Music: http://www.last.fm/user/rarosalion/

A site I’ve only discovered today, but which looks very promising is last.fm. Last.fm is an online radio station which suggests music, and creates custom radio stations for you based on the songs you like to listen to. Personally, I love hearing new music, but I’m not about to go out and buy CDs for Artists I don’t know well - I figure something like Last.FM can help here!

By installing some software on my computer, Last.FM can be notified when I’m playing music on my PC, and can then build up an idea of what I like listening to based on what other users enjoyed. Again, it’s a community-based website, using other people’s recommendations and tags to help make recommendations to you.

You can see what I’ve been listening to if you want!