At long last, after what seems like an eternity compared to the usually-rapid pace that most social networks evolve at, Flickr has implemented people-tagging. The functionality that most consider a defining characteristic of Facebook is now available on Flickr.

We've all been there: waking up on a Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, last night's drunkenly-debauched memories slowly swimming back into focus through your rheumy, sleep-encrusted eyes. You stagger into the kitchen or your study -- maybe there's a nice cup of coffee waiting for you. You sit down at your laptop -- or turn on your iPhone -- and check your mail.

There's the usual spam, the banal good-luck chain-letters and perhaps news that your copy of Windows 7 has just been dispatched. And then you see it.

'John Doe has tagged a photo of you on Facebook!'

Suddenly you find yourself plunged back into your memories of the night before. Desperately you poke and prod at the memory, praying the holiest damn prayer you've ever prayed, hoping that you didn't do something you'd later regret... something you'd later see on your computer screen... something your mother should never, ever see...

Quickly you un-tag yourself, cursing your friend, his family and his loved ones, praying you've done it quickly enough to avoid disaster.

And now ...? And now it can happen to you on both your social networks!

But wait! No! Flickr has gone one step further than Facebook! With Flickr you block people from tagging you in photos! With Flickr you can specify that only friends or family can tag you -- or no one at all!

The only real problem of course is that people don't often use Flickr for 'wild night out' photos -- that's usually reserved for Facebook. But would it be too crazy to suggest that Flickr could tie into the Facebook API and tag your Facebook friends on Flickr? Or will Facebook simply turn around and enable similar privacy options on tagging?

[via TechCrunch]

Fresh is a great little Mac app from Ironic Software -- probably better known for their file browser, Leap -- that gives you easy access to "fresh" items on your Mac. When you click on Fresh, all your recent downloads and recently edited files are right in front of you in an attractive dock-like display. If you want to keep a file fresh, so it's always quickly available, just drag it to the "cooler" section of the Fresh dock.

You can customize what shows up in Fresh by filtering out specific files or file types -- if you never want Fresh to show you applications, for example. Everything in the Fresh dock can be dragged into other apps, like Finder or Mail. With a right-click on any file, you can also tag it. This is great because you can now find that file by tag either using Fresh or by searching in the Finder.

So, with Fresh, you get a recent file manager and a system-wide tagger in one. Not a bad deal, especially considering that you can have Fresh for free right now at Macheist. That's some smooth promotion by Ironic, because Fresh is even more useful in conjunction with their slick-looking system-wide file browser, Leap.

A friend recently asked me how he could set his Gmail up so that he could email himself ideas, and have them be automatically filed away into a specific label instead of clogging up his inbox. Gmail has a function called Filters which is similar to rules in other email systems, and it is very powerful and well-suited to this task. If you would like to be able to email yourself information and have it automatically be stored away into a label and stay out of your inbox, follow these instructions.

So the first thing to keep in mind is that there are reasons where you might legitimately want to email yourself and have it show up in your inbox, for example you might Reply All to something and find that your email address was included as an addressee. You don't want a thread like that one getting automatically moved into a folder, or you might miss it.

So the solution is to use a custom email address, which is easy. Gmail supports an email standard that allows you to add a plus symbol after your username, and anything you like after that. So an email sent to username+ideas@gmail.com will go right into your Gmail account the same way one sent to username@gmail.com will.

But here's the cool thing: you can filter based on the actual incoming email address. Here's how:

Cocoalicious is a really slick -- but, unfortunately, Mac-only -- dedicated browser for your Del.icio.us bookmarks. If you're a bookmarking junkie, and you have way more sites saved to Del.icio.us than you could ever hope to keep track of, this could be an ideal solution for you. It's laid out a bit like Apple Mail, with your tags running down the left side, your bookmarks on top, and a browser pane at the bottom.

You can put bookmarks directly into Cocoalicious -- it syncs with your Del.icio.us account -- or use the bookmarklet to add stuff to Cocoalicious straight from your browser. This way you can take advantage of autocompletion, tagging by dragging, and other features that make Del.icio.us easier. Cocoalicious also supports Spotlight, so you can search for your bookmarks straight from the Finder!


[via Lifehacker]

If you write a blog, post pictures to Flickr, or do pretty much anything else online these days, odds are you've typed a few tags to go along with your picture, video, or blog entry. Tags make it easy for people, search engines, and advertisers to find stuff online.

But coming up with accurate and useful tags can be a lot of work. And there's a science to finding tags that will help increase your search engine traffic or advertiser revenue. Good luck if you don't have a degree in this particular science.

Jiglu is a new service that takes all the hard work out of tagging. Just enter your blog URL, sign up for an account, and Jiglu will spit out a bit of code that you can embed on your webpage. Jiglu integrates nicely with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and other popular blogging services.

Next, Jiglu goes to work analyzing all the text on your site and generates a list of relevant tags divided up into topics, people, events, and links. Jiglu shows up as a widget on your page. Scroll over it and a list of tags appears. You can click on a tag to bring up a list of matching stories. Or you can click on the Tag Map button for Jiglu's version of a tag cloud. Tags with larger fonts represent items that show up on your website more often than tags with smaller fonts.

The service is free to use. But when users click on a tag, the list of items matching that tag show up in a Jiglu pop-up window which includes advertising. You do not get a cut of the revenue generated through these ads. The company also plans to launch a premium fee-based service for websites with over a million monthly page views.

[via Mashable]

Webmail is a hot industry these days, with Gmail, Yahoo! and nearly every provider in between vying for users by adding as many features as they can dream up. Fortunately, a small provider named Litepost is taking a different approach, offering a streamlined webmail interface with just a dash of web 2.0 to help bring your email into the 21st century web. We found Litepost back in June when they announced very limited private beta testing of their product, and it seems as though they have quietly lifted the veil so the public can sign up. While there is no official announcement on the company's blog, the Litepost registration page is live and working, and we were able to sign up for an address just fine.

Litepost stands out with a number of unique features, including email tagging and rating, as well as interesting 'Who, What, When, Why' sorting methods with which, for example, you can sort by date first, then sender (or vice versa). You can also arbitrarily group messages together for any reason, solving one of the complaints of the message threading or conversation view that Gmail made popular. Another strong appeal of Litepost is the fact that it is open source, and a Litepost Webmail Server is in the works, which will allow individuals, organizations and businesses to download and install the Litepost software on their own server for domain and security goodness.

If all this has sparked your attention, take Litepost for a spin. In our testing we found its features and unique UI to be quite compelling, and its open source, portable nature will likely give it some legs with which to grow.

Thanks Alex

I've been a user of Gmail since late 2005 and have loved just about every minute of it. The revolutionary webmail interface, the vast popularity among power users and plethora of scripts, add-ons and doodads - but the one thing that always bothered me was the loss of integration with the rest of my computing. Sure, there are some great tricks and bookmarklets we found for our Top 10 Gmail tips and hacks post, but I've missed real integration with Mac OS X apps like iSale that can show me emails related to an auction I created with it, iPhoto that can compress copies of 20 images and attach them to a new message and even simply double-clicking a .VCF I've downloaded to quickly add it to Address Book and keep on working. Heck, toss in a dash of Automator and I really find myself longing for a desktop email client and the synchronized wonders of IMAP.

Thus began my journey to figure out some sort of a hack or workaround for using Gmail over IMAP with my preferred and well-integrated desktop email client, Apple Mail. It wasn't too difficult, but the setup requires your own web host who offers IMAP email that can scale up to around 2GB or more (for example: I already pay for hosting at DreamHost which offers IMAP with every account, but some companies offer free IMAP, and other hosting companies offer flexible solutions as well) and a little bit of incoming/outgoing server trickery. Another necessity is some sort of tool or plug-in to enable one of Gmail's most well-known features: tagging, otherwise known as labels. While Thunderbird is probably the first fairly mainstream email client to do tagging out of the box, it drops the ball on my need for integration; it doesn't support Apple's built-in Address Book (which so many other apps do), and it doesn't plug into all the other handy tools that allow so many of Mac OS X's 3rd party apps move data from one to another so effortlessly. For what it's worth, I also found a plug-in for Outlook on Windows called Taglocity that should get the job done, though I can't test it because I don't own Office. That said, all my setup instructions are written using Apple Mail, but you should be able to apply them to any IMAP-capable desktop email client and tagging plug-ins you find. As a bonus, this trick will also work for mobile devices that support IMAP, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerries and, of course, your shiny new iPhone. Following is my 7-step trick for using Gmail over IMAP, leveraging the power of desktop software while bringing the innovation of Gmail's tagging and conversations along for the ride.

So now that Yahoo owns Flickr why not integrate all these crazy, top notch, up to the second, newsworthy photos into Yahoo's image search? It only makes sense.

We wrote about this happening, and it's taken quite a while to do, but Yahoo has finally included Flickr photos in its queried search results. When images are uploaded to Flickr accounts worldwide and tagged, Yahoo gains access to these additions via a live feed from the Flickr service. When users then search in Yahoo, Flickr images will be marked with a Flickr account name. Searchers can then choose to view and search all photos by that particular user.

So as long as images are tagged correctly, they should start showing up in searches on Yahoo's Image Search.

BEA Systems, known for its leading enterprise infrastructure software, is getting set to launch its suite of corporate search and collaboration products. These three new applications look ready to help businesses with some Web 2.0 technologies including RSS feeds, tagging, and mashup platforms. Hey, enterprise business, here's your chance to roughly equal the kind of community building web interfaces that 20 somethings are pumping out from their basements.

Although integration efforts have been extremely slow for many businesses, it will be interesting to watch the effects these different integration options have with a number of useful 2.0 applications.

Platial announced on their blog the other day some fairly major upgrades to MapKit. Some of the new features for MapKit include comment moderation, map updating via RSS (or CSV), interface enhancements, and more. Platial, if you aren't familiar, allows you to create your own maps using the Google Maps interface, and allows you to share your maps with others. For example, you can create a map of great places to go out to dinner, or a map of coffee shops with free WiFi, along with descriptions, pictures, tagging and video. MapKit allows you to embed a Platial map into your own web page, all by pasting a small amount of JavaScript into any HTML document. The thing that I really like about Platial is that it brings so many logical, social features together, without detracting from the ease of use of Google Maps. Based in Portland, Platial shares office space with values of n, the folks who bring us Stikkit.

MP3 files have had tag properties forever, and it actually seems somewhat odd that they're not accessible in Windows Explorer, as part of the file properties pane. AudioShell fixes that, by exposing the audio file's id3 tags right within Windows Explorer where they can be viewed and updated.

AudioShell supports editing file tags individually, or doing groups of files all at once. It adds a verbose tooltip window when mousing over audio files, and adds the ability to choose specific id3 tags to add as columns in Windows Explorer, so you can easily sort by them, or manipulate your files as needed.

AudioShell is free, and supports the following file formats:

• mp3 (all ID3 tag versions)
• wma, asf and wmv (including DRM protected files)
• Apple iTunes and iPod aac (m4a, m4b and m4p) and mp4 files
• ogg, flac (vorbis comment tags)
• mpc, mp+ (APE/APEv2 tags)
• monkey's audio (APE/APEv2 tags)
• wav pack (APE/APEv2 tags)
• optim frog (APE/APEv2 tags)
• wav (ID3v2 tag in 'tag ' RIFF chunk)

[via Windows Fanatics]

For I don't know how long, Yahoo! News has provided the means to rate (aka recommend) news stories. It's not a simple "thumbs up/down" but a five-star scale. At the top of each topic page at Yahoo! News you can find links to "Most emailed," "Most viewed," and "Most recommended."

The most recommended stories bubble to the top at several places (along with their respective RSS feeds):

• All news stories
• All news photos
• World News
• Business News
• Entertainment News
• Sports News
• Technology News
• Political News
• Science News
• Health News
• Opinion

Drifting ever closer to YouTube country, Google Video got a substantial update last week. Among the new features are the ability to rate videos, tag (or "label," as Google prefers) them, and leave comments. Additionally, Google Video now has blogging features, allowing you post video directly to Blogger, MySpace, LiveJournal, and TypePad. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's possible to sort or filter search results by rating yet.