Uba Kontrovasie

The power of tagging

A seasonal post from me today…

People often ask me why the hell they should bother tagging content? Lot’s of reasons for this and I could sit here and yammer on about tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies etc etc.

Instead of me giving you guys a drawn out explanation I’ll let you do the reading into the theories in your own time, instead I will lend you my real life example of the benefits of tagging in effect.

I’m celebrating Diwali with my family at the moment, Diwali is the festival of light and the celebration of the Hindu new year.

Most of my friends know I love taking pictures or “freezing time” as I call it, anything to sound cool don’t you know :p Anyway Diwali has provided a whole host of Kodak moments and I have been busy snapping away in between meals, eating + snapping! It’s a great way to live, “try it you might like it”.

Yesterday (if I’m not mistaken) I uploaded some photo’s of tea lights on to my flickr account. Tea lights are lit in the morning and in the evening as part of the rituals/celebrations.

I tagged my photos on flickr with a single tag “Diwali”, this was me being lazy as I am appalling at tagging my pics. Today I got an email from a content editor/journo asking if my pics could be used in an article about Diwali along with other pics from around the world.

Naturally I was happy to let them use my snaps and the article can be found here

The website is called Now Public “crowd powered media”, Now Public pulls together public generated content around topics and asks asset owners to add their own commentary.

The comments all work together to form a nice collaborative article, whilst the assets (video & photo) are all mashed together using some kind of ajax thingamabob to form a really slick slide show.

I’m really liking the concept of Now Public, it is a good example of a website that is utilising public collaboration, social media and UGC. Rock on!

Now where did I leave those spring rolls and the rest of those Indian sweets

Tags: collaboration, diwali, flickr, folksonomies, now public, photography, social media, tagging, taxonomies, UGC

My iPhone

I’ve had it for a few months now, yes I was one of those sad people queuing outside the O2 store during the first month they came out.

This little gadget has seriously changed the way I work these days, here’s why:

- It syncs with my calendar at the office
- It syncs with with my work e-mail in real-time via the exchange
- The internet is fast enough for me to read my RSS feeds on it each morning en route to the office
- I have a better back because I do not need to a lug a laptop with me everywhere I go mon-fri

I haven’t massively got into all the fun applications just yet, however, here’s my run down of the ones that I’ve found the most useful:

Shozu - lets you upload pics from your iPhone to Flickr
Evernote - my “cloud” notepad of choice
Facebook for iPhone, need I explain any further
Twittereffic - All things twitter
Wordpress - Blogging on the fly
Google.co.uk/reader/i - access to my feeds
Light Saber - Yes a Light Saber on your iPhone (hours of fun)

Another app I also recommend is EventSync for the Mac, not an iPhone App as such but it lets you sync all Facebook events to iCal and iTunes does the rest by syncing everything to your handset. I’ve given up on the Upcoming + Facebook app working, it just keeps dying and not syncing both ways.

My criticisms? bad battery life, I’ve had to drop the screen brightness right down to make the battery last a full busy day. Also the camera could be better, they could have quite easily incorporated an LED flash like they did on the Sony K750 a few years ago.

Rant and praise over, hope you guys find the tips useful.

Tags: 3G, Apple, eventsync, evernote, facebook, flickr, ical, iphone, phone application, phone applications, shozu, twitteriffic, upcoming, wordpress