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!
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.
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.
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
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):
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.
One from the department of the inevitable: TagFetch is a search engine that pulls results from a variety of tag-friendly sites based on the tag(s) you enter. It's got a clean, usable interface with a streamlined Google-like front page. You can choose what kinds of results you want to see, i.e. news (Newsvine, Reddit), blogs (Technorati, Feedster), bookmarks (del.icio.us), or media (Flickr, YouTube), and results pages are organized accordingly. Results for each site have a handy "View More" link that loads more results without making you navigate away from the page (yay Ajax), but it's unclear exactly how results are ordered. I'd like to see results drawn from more sites, and I'd also like to see more customization (though registered users might have more options--account creation seems buggy just now). I'm not sure how useful TagFetch will be for serious searching, but it seems like it could be useful for digging up media and discussion about current events, of just for killing time.
According to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, eBay is going for a Web 2.0 trifecta and working on bringing blogs, wikis, and tagging to its auction sellers. Blogs and wikis will be launched at the eBay Live conference later this month and serve a variety of purposes, such as enhancing a store or discussing collectibles. Blogs will be free and each eBay Blog will have a URL like http://blogs.ebay.com/userID. Bloggers can specify "search tags" which are essentially keywords that will help blogs on a particular topic, e.g. Coke memorabilia, show up on relevant eBay searches. And of course, eBay blogs will include RSS feeds. More information on the upcoming features can be found in eBay's help pages: About eBay Blogs and About the eBay Wiki.
Well, this is unexpected. Slashdot has launched a
new social bookmarking feature a la del.icio.us. The new system has the requisite tagging, bookmarklet and Popular Bookmarks page, but beyond that it's very rudimentary—there's
no way to browse by tags, for instance. Slashdot doesn't seem to be trying to take on del.icio.us, though. According to
CmdrTaco, Slashdot Bookmarks "is primarily an extension of our submission bin ... our intent is that this system
eventually be used to help us find content for the mainpage." He also says RSS feeds are coming, but just browsing
the popular page I've already come upon some interesting links. It will be interesting to see whether Slashdot Bookmarks
will take Slashdot in a similar direction to Digg, or if the editorial process will remain more or less unchanged.
Sociable is a plugin
for Wordpress that adds cute link icons to each of your blog posts that users can click on to quickly add the post to
their favorite social bookmark service like del.icio.us or news sites like Digg, Newsvine, or Fark. The plugin can be
configured to show icons for any of the 24 (and counting) supported services, and installing it is, as with most
Wordpress plugins, a snap.
Pixrat is basically
del.icio.us for photos. I don't say that disparragingly, though--Pixrat works as advertised and will definitely be
useful for some people. By clicking on the Pixrat bookmarklet when viewing a page with a photo on it you can give the
photo a description and tags, then later you can browse your boomarked photos with handy thumbnails, optionally
searching by tag. You can also, of course, browse everyone else's photos or view the most popular recent photos. Pixrat
does lack a few of del.icio.us' more powerful features like tag intersections and RSS feeds, but those issues aside, I
can see Pixrat as being very useful people who keep track of a lot of stock photos, for example, at a number of
different sites.
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. 
I've been a user of 
Sociable
Pixrat
