“When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.” Annie Leibovitz

Now you can head on to the Flickr site itself or you can play around with the related tag browser. This site takes advantage of the fact that every picture on Flickr is tagged for easy finding and organizing. You can type a search in the middle and see what comes up or after you get you result you can click on all the tags that surround the pics in the middle. If you point to the pics in the middle you can get closer but if you move to the outer edges than you can zoom out to see all the tags. Once you click a picture it will show up on the right. From there you could either head onto a different photo or onto the photographers page in Flickr. If you love photos and just want to wander in a pictured universe then give this one a try.

“The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.” Henri Cartier-Bresson

Time for a bit of rehashing of an old subject. I blogged about Flickr a while back but i realized i did not do it any justice. Flickr is a Yahoo owned photo sharing website community. Essentially a person uploads a photo and the community tags or leaves comments about it. There are thousands of thousands of photos and I believe it is one of the most popular photo services on the net. The reason for its popularity is simple it is easy to use and the community of viewers are very responsive. No longer does one hold pictures in a vacuum but they share it with the world at large. Photos are now being seen as more than a split second of time but a way of archiving the planet and it's inhabitants. Now, because so many people use this gigantic photo album many sites have mashed up their ideas with the Flickr page.
The help page can be a bit cumbersome so check this page out for a nice summary.I would like to dedicate the rest of the week to highlighting some of these new extras. In the meantime check out Flickr and give it a try.

“I call everyone 'Darling' because I can't remember their names.” Zsa Zsa Gabor

To round out this mini discussion on Web 2.0 I want to talk about a feature that is used by most of the social sites. Folksonomies are user generated tags used to organize and describe things on the web. This usually takes the form of a cloud of words called a tag cloud. At the most basic level it is a jumble of words that range in size. This represents how much information there is on a topic. If it is large there is a lot of info, small, less so. Without this system it is just a jumble of non indexed information. Most of the social sites use this to make it easier to find information. Try some of the ones below to really get an idea. I am only listing tag clouds here today.

• FlickR- find interesting photos through tags
• Del.icio.us- see other people's bookmarks
• Librarything - find books
• Technorati - tags on tags used on blogs
• Voodoochili - tags submitted by visual artists
• Presidential cloud - Presidents speeches reduced to tag clouds
• New York Times - search stories through their clouds. See what they cover in a glance
  

This ends Web 2.0 week for now but I plan on revisiting this topic because as the hive mind increases so will the uses. Give it a try.

“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” Mitchell Kapor

Sticking with the subject of Web 2.0 I would like to talk about one my favorite websites. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. What does this mean? If I come across something I like I bookmark it. Now I see a lot of websites in an average day but the vast majority of them I will never see again. Only the ones I save will I revisit. The problem is that those bookmarks are only on one machine. So if I go home and want to check something that is bookmarked I have to do a search for it. Del.icio.us helps with this situation. Instead of saving your bookmarks to your machine you save them to the site and you can access them from anywhere. Now the Web 2.0 aspect of this is that for every bookmark you save you also tag it with keywords that would help yourself and others find it. Then you can look through other people's bookmarks by searching the tags. As an example I need a good website for a student about digital photos so I search using the keyword photo. I come across site after site of what other people think is important concerning photos. Also I can read their notes that may tell me how to use the site or why to use it. I have come across more useful sites that I use and blog about then I can name. Now understand that this means you are going to come across everything that people bookmark meaning items from the G rated to X rated. It seems the vast majority falls around PG-13. If a search engine has failed you give it a try.