I think that I’ve solidified my position on some of the social/tagging sites that are trendy these days.

First, ***flickr|http://www.flickr.com/***. I think flickr has some cool technology for people who want to share photos. I like their tagging system, whereby you can assign multiple categories to the photos you upload, and then view your collection (or other peoples’ collections) grouped by tag. The idea of a running photo stream is cool, and their tagging combined with their RSS feeds provide neat ways to integrate your photos into a website. But for me, it’s just not necessary. We already have a huge ***gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***. Though it doesn’t have tags, it is pretty well categorized and organized (if I do say so myself), and it’s easily searchable. Google has our gallery well indexed, and the gallery has its own search engine. Plus, it has its own RSS feed – just look for the ubiquitous orange button at the bottom of any gallery page. So flickr… if we didn’t already have a great, established photo gallery, and I was looking to get started with sharing photos on the web… I might have some use for you…

The other tagging tool that I’ve been trying out is ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/***. Using a ***bookmarklet|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet*** or a Firefox extension, I can grab the URL of whatever page I’m looking at, write up a brief description of the page, and then provide a few tags to denote the categories that the page fits in to. This adds the page to my running list of links, groups it into various categories by tag, and aggregates it with links other people have posted from the same categories. del.icio.us also tracks how many people have posted a given link, so if you visit my ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/prwood*** page, you can see which of the links I’ve posted have also been posted by others. Pretty sweet. Using one of the multitude of RSS feeds that are available, I’ve integrated my del.icio.us feed into my ***clipblog|http://prwdot.org/?p=clipblog***. I still use ***Bloglines|http://www.bloglines.com/*** to actually manage my blogroll and read new blog entries and news, but del.icio.us will now be the place that I stash all of the interesting links that I read. I’m still learning more about how to make better use of it.

w00t.