Mmmmm, a Delicious Toolbar for your browser. Thing 12.

I'm guessing that if you are just looking at Delicious for the first time as part of Cam23, you will find it one of the most useful and practical web 2.0 tools out there, both from a personal and a professional perspective. So rather than go through the basics I thought I'd come at it from a different angle and write a post on a little widget I use everyday: the Delicious Toolbar.

I use Firefox and the toolbar like this: 

It has three parts to it (as marked out in red above):
1. The drop down menu

As you can see, this gives you the option to save a new bookmark, gives you access to a list of recently bookmarked URLs, a list of all your tags, and your most visited bookmarks. The latter is extremely helpful when trying to decide which bookmarks to have as icons in your bookmarks toolbar.

2. The shortcuts on the navigation bar:

The tag icon (on the left in the image above) brings up a very handy pop up which allows you to save a page in Delicious and add notes and tags. The Delicious icon (in the middle) takes you to your Delicious homepage and the bookmark icon (to the right) brings up a left-hand list of all your tags and bookmarks. (I can't put screenshots of all of these functions in as it would get a bit crowded in here, so you'll just have to have a go yourself!)

3.  The Toolbar:

This lists your most recently bookmarked pages, or you can change the view to your most visited pages.

The Delicious icon on the far left gives you even more display options:

So how do you get this delicious tool, I hear you ask...

For Firefox go to:  http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/firefox 
For Internet Explorer: http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/ie



There is also a toolbar for Chrome, but this is has a totally different layout: http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/chrome

Happy bookmarking!

An amble through Flickr brings me to a highland cow and Thing 9

Oh goody, goody, goody! This is the Thing I've been wating for: Flickr. I luuuurrrrve photography and images and have had 'join Flickr' on my to do list for so long that it changed from 'join Picasa or Flickr' to just 'join Flickr' as this giant of the image world has slowly taken over over.

So far I have only used Flickr as a search engine for creative commons images for use on websites, so the full functionality of the site is relatively alien to me. I also haven't been very good at following the destructions, I mean  instructions, for each Thing on the Cam23 blog so this presents a good opportunity for me to follow the rules for once and look at something with fresh eyes...

...I got as far as 'Try one or more of the following searches' and I was away, lost in my own thoughts. Then I realised I had too many thoughts and would have to start writing this post before it became a novel.

So, here goes. I will take you through my Flickr amble step-by-step and think out loud as I do so...

Destruction 1: Go to www.flickr.com and, without entering text into the search box,
click on ‘Search’
All ok so far, I get the main search screen with a blank search field. Doing well I think, so award myself with a cup of tea...


Destruction 2: Try one or more of the following searches...
Hmmm, I'll go for a place I want to visit and enter 'Lake District' and search under 'Everyone's uploads'. Not a good move. Takes ages. Tea goes cold.
Try again and narrow the search down to 'Ambleside'  . Much better: get 25,474 results in a couple of seconds.

Leave destructions and do my own thing...
Sort results by 'interesting'. That looks, well, interesting. How do they define interesting? Are images tagged that way? No idea, let's see... oh, there's a photo of a highland cow that catches my eye. What's that got to do with Ambleside?  (can't show you the photo here as 'all rights reserved' but I can link to it: Highland cow by Lune Rambler

Explore the little 'i' information button that's part of the thumbnail image. Oh, that's cool. Brings up a lightbox with extra info, including tags and I can see some of the tags, but not all of them as there is a '...'

... to find out more... click on the thumbnail of the picture to drill through to the bigger picture (no pun intended!). When I pass the mouse over the big image I can see that there is a hotspot over the cow's face and I am invited to 'give me a happy face'. OK. I will. Click on the mouseover and am taken to another user's Flickr site. I have no idea what that was about as I was expecting the cow to get a cartoon smiley face. That would have been quite fun. Maybe it is some kind of viral marketing? Answers on a postcard please...

Next I decide I want to explore the tags for this image a bit further. Mais, ou sont les tags?? I have to scroll down quite a way past all the sets and the 'plus-signed' folders on the right-hand side (really don't know what they are and look annoying to me) to find the tag list. 30+ tags. Excellent. A photographer after my own heart; see previous post on tagging. 

This is good, when I hover over the tags I can see who added them. Mostly the photographer, but also other users who seem to have put the photo into some kind of folder, or put it forward for an award? E.g. 'PlatinumHeartAward'.

Again, I don't know what that's about. I will have to do some more exploring and sign up to put my own pics on there.

Scrolling down a bit further, under the tags, there is some interesting equipment information. I can click through to stats about the camera, great for a photo-geek like me. I can also see the individual properties of the photo. Exposure, aperture etc. etc.  **rubs hands with glee**.

Having just bought a new digital SLR I used Flickr to see which camera  SirCam was using. I much admire his photos so was interested to see what equipment produced such good shots. I did in the end go for a Canon camera and was highly influenced by Flickr photos in this choice. Fickr is good for camera research. You can even see how popular a certain model is when you click on the camera in the 'additional information' section of an image (see above).

So, all that remains is for me to put my new camera into action and sign up for a Flickr account. Watch this space...

End of amble.

Spiders and future-proofing your cloud. Tagging# Thing 8

I guess my approach to tagging is embarassing for a librarian; it's haphazzard, willy-nilly, erratic and exessive. Like those caffeine drugged spiders , I tend not to have any structure to my tagging web. It's about how I feel on the day, on the minute, on the second, and more importantly, how I think I will feel in the future...

I get scared you see, of not being able to find anything again. How do I stop the cloud eating up all my data and dispersing it as rain somewhere I can't find it? My answer is, tags, tags and more tags.  And, so far it has worked. My Delicious account has a ma-hou-sive tag cloud,  BUT,  I can find stuff.  For example, anything to do with images is tagged under: 'photo' 'image' 'picture' 'jpeg' etc., etc. Whatever my brain decides to search under, it is likely to find what it's looking for first time round.

When I find a site I like, I usually put it away away for later perusal. Whether this is in a bookmark, in Delicious, or in an email folder. Any which way, I have to tag it so you can find it again. When you get that niggle in the back of your brain that says 'hang on a minute', I've seen that somewhere before. That niggle could be 2 weeks down the line, or 2 months down the line, or 2 YEARS down the line. How do you know what you are going to type into the search box 2 years later about your vague niggle. You're darned tooting it won't be what you tagged it 2 years ago when  you felt different, acted different, were different...

So, I see tagging as trying to 'future-proof' your cloud, if that is at all possible. The more options you give yourself,  your future self, and your other selves, the better. The more chance you have of finding things again.

That said, I will introduce a bit of structure to this post by offering up Marsh's list of twitter tag types. In my observences over the last few months I've noticed that twitter tags fall into a certain number of categories depending on the aims of the tagger:

1. #the humourous tag - the one where you add humour to an otherwise embarrassing situation, #oopsImeantputnotpus. No use for information gathering and recall but gets you out of a tight spot.
2. #the conference tag -  Comment on the speakers/organisation/food & drink and see what other people really think, in real time. Let those who couldn't come know what's going on. Can act as a useful minute taking method #ala10 #libatcam11??
3. # reference tag - pure bog-standard reference. I want to be able to find this later or for other people to easily find it too.
4. #The bot tag - I want to see if a web bot picks me up on my desire to buy a #digitalSLR and offers me a good deal (!)
5. #the trendy tag - I want to appear in a trending topic, I do, Ido, #WayneRooneyCantPlayFootballForToffee
6. #the small conversation tag - so you can follow a group conversation more easily #drinksonthursdayanyone ?
7. #the Face tag on Twitpic - a la Facebook, tag a face, any face....

There must be more types of twitter tag. Can you think of any?