MakeUseOf » tagging

It’s Now Much Easier To Tag Your Friends In Google+ Albums [News]

Yaara Lancet — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:01:53 +0000

Google+ is finally offering quick and easy photo tagging. It seems as if Google are taking their time with Google+, and every once in a while we’re awarded a new, much-needed feature. A few weeks ago we got Google+ Pages, and now it’s time for tagging to be upgraded. Google being Google, this is not just your regular old photo tagging; it’s cool, it’s easy, it’s super fast and it hunts for faces.

If you’ve been using Picassa, you already know about Google’s ability to recognize faces – Picassa’s face recognition is sometimes uncanny. Google+ now does something similar: it gathers all the faces in your photo album and lets you tag them in groups.

If your photos include people, you will get the option to tag them. You can access tagging from existing albums, when creating new albums or when sharing photos from the sharebox. Google+ will scan your photos for people, offer you to tag them and even tell you how many faces it found.

Once you access the tagging interface, simply go over the faces it found for you and click all the ones which belong to the same person. The thumbnails you click will be transferred over to the right side, where you can tag all them at once by name or email address (which is associated with a Google+ account). Note that you can’t tag people if they’re not on Google+.

When you’re done tagging all the faces, click “Done tagging”. Now all your tagged friends will get notifications that they’ve been tagged, and they can choose whether they want to approve it or not.

All in all, this is a great upgrade and it’s very well implemented. It now remains to be seen if Google can integrate tagging from within Picassa to have those work well with Google+ albums.

What do you think about the new tagging interface? Share your experiences and opinions.

Source: +Nathan Davis, Google+ team

Elyse – Keep Your Filesystem More Organized By Tagging Everything [Mac & Windows]

Angela Alcorn — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:31:17 +0000

Once you’ve played around with tags for a while, you’ll really begin to wonder why user data in file systems isn’t organised by tag. For the bulk of the file system, folders make sense, but for user data it can quickly become a nightmare of aliases and folders which don’t actually contain what you’re looking for.

Mac’s Spotlight can help you to find what you’re after eventually, but for those of us who actually try to stay organised, we’re keen to make it simple to find exactly what we need when we need it. Elyse is able to help here, by providing a free tag-based file management solution for Mac and Windows.

Why Tag Files?

If you’re not already on the file system tag bandwagon, think about things we habitually tag online. Photos, blog posts and music genres are all generally tagged online rather than placed in folders. Can you imagine sites like Last.fm placing all classical music in a folder called “Classical” rather than tagging with other useful genres such as “Choral” or “Baroque“? Things would get out of hand pretty quickly and it would be very difficult to be able to find the exact music you wanted to listen to.

It’s the same with your file system. On sites like Flickr you can tag your photos with the city you were in, some detail of the subject of the photo and many other things you find useful. On a regular file system you’re stuck using folders, so most people wind up with photos arranged by date taken as it’s one of the only ways the photos will ever be found again. If only you could tag all those photos…

However, it’s not just photos. What about essays? Letters? Spreadsheets? Once you start thinking about it, tags make much more sense than folders and will go a long way toward improving filesystem organization.

Get Elyse

Download a free copy of Elyse for Mac or Windows. We’ll be taking a closer look at the Mac version in particular. Installation for Mac is straight-forward – all you do is open the .dmg download and drag the application to your applications folder.

The first thing you’re faced with is the need to create a default database. Once “Create Default Database” is clicked, you’ll be presented with a beginner guide to Elyse and instructions to create a fresh database to start your file tagging.

Add & Tag Files

Adding your files is easy – all you do is drag and drop the files you want to tag into Elyse. Elyse then automatically creates tags based on your folder names, so you’re halfway organised already!

Add new tags by clicking on the “New Tag” button in the menu. New tags can be dragged and dropped throughout the tag tree as you wish. You can also rearrange these tags and hierarchies without disrupting the original location of the file on your filesystem.

Alternatives

Mac users can also use Quicksilver to tag files, while Windows 7 users can tag photos and office documents natively. However, Elyse is a solution which will allow you to tag any files you like and keep track of things in one place. There’s also a few other tools you could try, such as Tagged Frog for Windows or Tag It for Mac.

Does file system tagging work for you? Do you use Elyse or some other program? Let us know in the comments!

How to Reduce Facebook Photo Tagging Clutter

Ann Smarty — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:30:32 +0000

Facebook photo tagging was introduced as an easy-to-use tool for sharing important moments of your life with your contacts. The ability to tag a friend in a photo to let him / her know you have uploaded a photo of him may be fun. However the feature has been so abused and spammed that many people prefer to stay away from being tagged.

To start, here’s how Facebook photo-tagging works: once you are tagged in your friend’s photo, it becomes visible in your “Photos” section. Moreover, this update is sent to your public timeline and this photo thumbnail is added to your main photo stream on your profile page.

Why may you want to reduce the photo tagging? There are plenty of Facebook applications that tag you automatically which often clutters your public timeline. Besides, with newly-introduced features like “group tagging“, photo tagging has become more and more popular which means it results in more clutter.

If you are tired of irrelevant photo-tagging and don’t want your tagged photos to interfere with your own albums and uploads, here are a couple of settings you should be aware of:

Prevent your friends from seeing the photos you are tagged in:

As far as I know, you can’t completely disable the feature and avoid being tagged. However you can reduce the clutter by not sending your friends a public update once you are tagged.

Here’s how you can find the option:

Click “Account” in the top-right corner and there “Privacy Settings”;
Scroll down a bit to a little blue link “Customize Settings”:

Now click “Edit” button next to “Photos and videos you’re tagged in” and select “Customize“:

There you will be able to set that the photos you are tagged in are only visible to you.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can also hide those photos (which are uploaded by someone else and thus are not under your control) from some of your contacts. This way you can protect your privacy by preventing your parents or boss from seeing some (possibly embarrassing) photos before you login to remove the tag.

Disable Photo Tag Auto-Suggestions

When any of your friends upload photos to his Facebook profile, he will be prompted to tag you if any person on their photos looks *like* you.

This is a comparatively new feature that is called “tag suggestions” and is aimed to “make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.” It uses face recognition technology to automatically find one and the same person on all photos you upload and prompt you to tag that person with one click.

You may be OK with that but you should know that you can turn this feature off any time (in case you don’t want to be tagged too often): in the same section of your Privacy settings click “Edit” button next to “Suggest photos of me to friends” (and disable auto-suggestions there).

Are you aware of any other Facebook settings to control the photo tagging feature? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Lastly, here are a few more essential Facebook privacy settings you should be aware of:

Image Credit:Facebook Blog

The 3 Best Bookmarking Alternatives To Delicious

Steve Campbell — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:31:05 +0000

Do you use Delicious to keep track of all of your bookmarks? If you do, you may have noticed the service mentioned in the news in recent months, with talks of Yahoo shutting Delicious down or selling it in the near future. This presents a cause for concern to some, especially if you’re a long-time user who’s afraid of possibly losing all of their hard-earned, well-placed bookmarks.

Or perhaps you aren’t concerned at all. Maybe you just dread the idea of switching services, or maybe you’ve been looking to switch but aren’t quite sure how to. What you need is a list of good alternatives. With the services listed below, you will be able to migrate your bookmarks over from Delicious, allowing you to rest easy knowing they’re alright.

1. Delicious To Google Bookmarks

Let’s start with the most recent method that’s out there. Just a few days ago, Google launched a new tool that allows you to import your Delicious bookmarks into Google Bookmarks. How timely of them.

Like everything Google makes, the importer is very basic and straight forward to use. You can log in using your Delicious credentials or click the OAuth link to import all your bookmarks, labels and tags included.

2. Springpad

Springpad is another really good alternative to Delicious. You can use Springpad as a place to save things you want to remember, but if you’re a Delicious user they also support importing your bookmarks.

To do this, you’ll need to log into your Delicious account, then go to Settings>Export/Backup Bookmarks. Springpad will import your tags and notes. Then you log into your Springpad account and follow the simple instructions for uploading your Delicious bookmarks.

One Springpad Bookmark will be created for each of your Delicious Bookmarks, with all of the original titles and privacy settings left intact. A new notebook called ‘delicious’ will be created to house all of them.

3. Diigo

Next up on the list is Diigo. With Diigo, you can easily import your Delicious bookmarks. Like Springpad, you’ll need to export your bookmarks from Delicious first. Then, log into Diigo, click on Tools at the top-right of the page. Select the Import Bookmarks link and locate the file that Delicious helped you export and you’re all done. Like the other services I’ve mentioned, all of your tags will transfer over too.

Conclusion

I’ve also seen that Evernote can handle the importing of Delicious bookmarks, so if you prefer to use Evernote over the other services I mentioned you might want to explore that option as well, although it does take a bit more work.

So there you have it, three solid ways to preserve your Delicious bookmarks, should you feel the need to either back them up somewhere or switch services altogether. There are other methods out there, sure, but as far as I can tell these are your best available options. I’ll leave the decision up to you, but I’ve listed them in the order in which I would go about the move.

Do you still use Delicious to keep track of all your online bookmarks? Which of these services would you most like to switch to? Leave a comment below so we can get a good discussion going!

Tag Your Music Collection The Easy Way With Tagr [Mac]

Jeffry Thurana — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:31:24 +0000

Do you remember the Walkman from the 1980′s? That was one of the coolest things a teenager could have back then. It fit inside the shirt pocket, and it played cassette tapes. Each one of the tapes was 1 to 1.5 hours long. So it was the perfect companion for your long trip, provided that you brought enough batteries and tapes.

But the coolest gadgets of the eighties are pale compared to the toys that the 21st century kids have. Today’s teenagers don’t do cassette tapes. The portable music players have gone from magnetic tapes to digital files – mostly MP3s. One such player could hold (tens of) thousands of songs and the batteries last for almost a day.

But this miracle of modern technology brings with it an unexpected problem: music management. Nobody I know has a perfectly clean and tidy music collection. Most of their songs are not properly tagged: song titles, artist, genre, numbering, capitalization and so on.

Not because they don’t want to, but because tidying up thousands of song tags is not the kind of fun activity everybody has in mind. That’s why we need the help of music tagging utilities. Something like Tagr.

Start The Tagging With Tagr

If you have lots of songs with messy tags in your collection – like almost everybody else in this digital age – and you want to tag your music and put them in order without all the hassles, then Tagr might be the answer to your prayers.

After downloading and installing the latest version of the app (v. 3.1.1 at the time of writing), you can put it on duty right away.

The main window is divided into two parts: the tagging area on the left and the song list area on the right. Using Tagr to tag your music is as simple as dragging and dropping the songs onto the song list area and correct the tags via the tagging area. You can do the tagging manually or (almost) automatically, one song at a time or in bulk.

Please note that you can’t drag songs directly from the iTunes interface. However, you can select folders from within the iTunes Library in Finder.

I tried the app by dragging a folder of one music album to the app. A list of the songs instantly appeared in order in the right pane sorted by the song number, while on the left pane we had ready-to-edit fields of information which corresponded to the selected item(s) on the right.

You can edit the tags at the upper area of the tagging pane called “Attributes” or directly on the list by clicking on the text.

However, I was dying to try the “automatically search for song data” feature located at the bottom of the window. So I selected all the songs, and then clicked the “Search in Amazon” option from the pop-up menu.

This action opened up Amazon in my default browser using the artist and album as the search string.

Then I tried the “Search in Discogs“. This time, Tagr switched to a “Cover Flow”-like interface and showed me the results there. Depending on your internet connection, this process could take some time.

If you want to apply one (or more) of the results, just select the result and click the “Copy to Selection” button on the middle right.

Tools Of The Trade

Tagr provides its users with a set of tools to make the whole process easier.

The first is the “Numbering” tool. Select the songs and click on the icon, and you can append numbers to the songs based on your preferences.

The second is the “File Naming” tool. This is the tool to tidy up the file names of the original files.

Third is the “Capitalization” tool. This tool will help you fix this: “tiTLe oF THe SonGS” and turn it into this: “Title Of The Songs” (or all UPPERCASE or lowercase).

And to sum up, the “All in One” tools. Clicking this icon will apply all of the above tools at once, based on the settings you chose for each tool.

Catch The Cover Art

If you happen to have the digital cover art for the album, you can add the image by selecting the song and then dragging and dropping the picture to the “Artwork” area. The image will then be embedded to the file as part of the file so you won’t ever lose it.

Another cool thing about this embedding image thing is that you can add more than one picture to the file. You can just drag and drop another picture, or use the “plus” button. To delete a picture from the file(s), use the “minus” button.

Tagr will tell you how many images are there in the file(s). Use the left and right arrow buttons to browse through cover art. Embed the pictures to the songs by clicking the button on the right.

Rinse & Repeat

And when everything is set, click the “Save to Disk” icon at the top left of the window to keep your changes.

After that, all you have to do is rinse and repeat the process for other songs and other albums to tag all of your music. As you might have guessed by now, the process helps you the most when you go in bulk rather than individual files.

What method do you use to tidy up the tags of your music collection? Have you ever tried Tagr? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

How To Use Delicious To Organize Your Student Life

Angela Alcorn — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:30:11 +0000

Have you ever finished a course and later wondered what was the name of that book you wanted to get around to reading? Can’t recall the brilliant tips you were given? Wish you could still find your readings? Can’t remember the tutor’s name anymore? Wish you knew what books other people had referenced in their assignments? Would love to do a refresher course and see what they teach new students these days? Well, it doesn’t have to be like this. You can keep track of it all – easily.

Don’t think this guide is just for students in formal education. Every day worldwide, many people are self-educating for current jobs or career changes. People also take short courses, seek out mentorships or sometimes employers offer some other form of education. Whatever your level or mode of study, this method of using Delicious bookmarking will put you well ahead of your peers and keep your valuable lessons easily accessible for the rest of your life.

Delicious is a fabulous web application which doesn’t get nearly enough attention. It is versatile, free and extremely powerful once you start using it effectively. Here’s a step-by-step guide to using Delicious bookmarking to keep track of everything you and your classmates ever needed to know for your studies.

Simple steps to using Delicious Bookmarking for study

Sign up. If you haven’t used Delicious before, sign up and import your old browser bookmarks.
Tag everything. Think of a tag for your course and memorable tags for each class, topic and typical essay topics. These will be used across many classes. Also note your class codes and use the code as a tag for anything relevant to that class.
Bundle it up. Create a Delicious tag bundle that includes all the relevant tags for your course, including the class code tags.

Note that for each tag, you can view everything that has ever been tagged by using http://delicious.com/tag/yourtag. This means you can see everything your classmates, tutors and lecturers have tagged with the class code too – and not just during your course. After your course is finished, there will still be people using this course tag – especially if you train your lecturers and tutors to suggest it to future classes. This means you can continue to be informed of useful articles, books, journals and quotes relevant to your qualifications long after you are finished your studies.

It’s quite worthwhile taking your time to introduce this system to your classmates, tutors and lecturers. The more people using it the better.

What should you bookmark?

Ideally, you should bookmark anything directly relevant to your course or class that either you or a classmate might be pleased to find one day. Always add information about why it was relevant. For example, “Tutor said this was a perfect example of poor website design”.

Start with reading your course material. Bookmark the following:

URLs given to you in class notes.
If books are mentioned (as required texts or extra readings), find the book in Google Books and bookmark the link (along with any reasons why it was cited). Ensure you note which pages were given to you as readings and why.
Follow any links your tutors and lecturers give about themselves. Try to bookmark their website, Twitter or other public information which tells you a little about them, how they got where they are and what their focus is. This helps you to understand them better, understand what you need to focus on in your assignments and also to note what other career options might be available for you. It’s also a great way to remind yourself of the important names down the track for networking, your CV or other reasons.
Link to journals and extracts of relevant articles.
Read class forums and bookmark any links your classmates suggest is relevant.
Bookmark links to professional organisations and future career paths mentioned in your course.

Don’t forget to use the class code tag and any relevant tags to indicate class topic, course topic, section in coursework, related essays, etc.

It’s easy to do this step at the very beginning of each class, before the assignment deadlines start looming. You’ll appreciate it down the track as you’ll have everything at your fingertips and an overall grasp of your class before you get stuck into it.

Building on your records

After the basic coursework links are bookmarked, it’s time to build on this and add your own links. You might like to keep some of the following private until after your assignments are handed in (so no one else in your class uses your best articles).

For every weekly topic of each class, search for relevant articles and guides. Make sure everything that is taught in your class is bookmarked for later (found in various places online, not just in your course material). This keeps track of everything you learned in the class, plus it gives you a good start for essay bibliographies.
When you search for items relevant to your essays, bookmark them also.
If anyone is having difficulty with certain points in your class, find and bookmark relevant websites which answer their questions.

When you’re reading these articles properly, take a little extra time to note the things you will want to use in essays or find again later. Add this extra information to your Delicious description. For example, add complete quotations with appropriate referencing details. When you’re writing essays further down the track you will pat yourself on the back. Especially in your final year, when you can easily spot the quote you need from a bookmark of a first-year reading.

How to keep track of all the tags?

The Delicious tag bundle is a great start to keeping track of all the tags. With everything collected, you can see all the relevant tags clearly.

You can also get “meta” and save the bookmark for http://delicious.com/tag/yourtag so that you’ll never forget that everyone else’s bookmarks are easy to find too.

RSS is an excellent way to access your Delicious bookmarks. Remember two simple things:

It’s possible to subscribe to an RSS feed of the class tag (that everyone is contributing to). Go to http://delicious.com/tag/yourtag and subscribe to the feed using the RSS icon.
You can subscribe to a private RSS feed of either your class tag or your entire course Delicious bundle. This way, you’ll get all the private bookmarks too. To do this, look at the very bottom of each page and click on “Private RSS Feed”.

Also, see these other great MakeUseOf articles on Delicious:

Now you are well aware of how easily you can keep track of all your study notes in Delicious, you should have a great headstart in your next course. Don’t forget to teach your classmates and lecturers. Share your success stories here!

Image Credit: Lcrward

5 Cool Ways To Tag Your Friends In Facebook

Tim Lenahan — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:31:04 +0000

So what does it mean to be tagged? I remember being young and playing tag or hide and seek and no one wanted to be tagged. Being tagged meant you were “it” remember?

Today, at least on Facebook (become a fan of MakeUseOf), people don’t seem to mind being tagged so much. Now, there are some cool ways to tag your friends in Facebook. Let’s go through some of them.

1. Tag Your Friends In Facebook With Photographs That Contain Their Faces

This is the most obvious use of tagging, I think. The idea is that if you, or one of your friends, upload a photo (also learn how to automatically insert photo captions when you upload to Facebook), you can tag people you recognize in it. As long as the person you recognize is on your friends list, you can tag them in photos.

It’s easy and fun. Just navigate to the photo and click the tag link at the bottom right of the photo.

You’ll be given a cross-hair for a cursor. Use that cursor and click the face of the person you are tagging. At that time a list of your friends will show up. Just scroll to find the right friend or start typing the name to narrow the list.

When you are done tagging people, click the “done tagging” button to save everything you’ve done.

See? Easy-peasey. And to add to it all, the person you tag will get notified.

2. You Can Tag Your Friends In Those Silly Tagging Memes

A lot of people really get into these things. They enjoy looking through the pictures and drawings containing characters that describe different attributes people may have. For instance, in the meme in the screenshot below, my wife and I were tagged as “The Inseparable” which I accept with pride.

Tagging in this instance works the same way, just in a picture that doesn’t contain an actual photo of the person being tagged. It’s kind of cool being tagged on Facebook in this manner.

3. You Can Tag People In Photos Where They Do Not Appear – Just To Notify Them There’s A Photo You Want Them To See

The idea here is that when you see a photo you want one of your friends to check out, you can tag them in it. For instance, I often see photos with someone’s children in them so they get tagged. The child may not have a Facebook account but the uploader still wants the parent to see the picture.

Like I said, when you are tagged in a photo, you are notified. To be honest, although I understand why people do this, it still annoys me. If I see that someone is tagged in a photo, and I check it out, I’d like to find that person in it. That’s just my personal opinion. It’s still a cool way to tag someone on Facebook.

4. You Can Tag Someone In A Note

Note tagging is very similar to photo tagging and almost as cool. The idea is the same. You tag someone in a note for the same two reasons: they are mentioned in the note (probably the actual proper use) or you want someone to be notified so they can read it. I have been personally tagged in several of my friends’ notes but mostly so I get notified.

5. You Can Tag Someone You Are Mentioning In A Status Update

Another cool tagging option you have is the “@” tag in status updates. I haven’t seen this too much yet which tells me that not too many people realize it’s even possible. Any Twitter user realizes that when they mention another user, they just type “@” and the username so they are notified that they were tagged. Facebook finally jumped on that bandwagon and now Facebook folks can do it too.

When writing a status update, type the “@” symbol and begin typing a friend’s name. A list should show up allowing you to choose them from it. When you do this, the name turns into a link and they are notified that you mentioned their name. This is cool because now people can know when they are being talked about so they can join the conversation. Notice that you can also tag groups and pages in this manner.

Facebook, as one of the most popular social networking sites, has done a good job in the area of tagging. I think tagging in general is cool because it brings people together in unique ways. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that you can also remove tags referring to yourself if you don’t like the idea of being mentioned some place.

These are 5 cool ways to tag friends on Facebook. If I have missed any, please share in the comments. What is your opinion of tagging? Do you think it is cool tagging and being tagged? Do share.

How To Add A Cool 3D Tag Cloud To Your WordPress Blog

Jeffry Thurana — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:30:02 +0000

The vast amount of cool customizations maybe one of the reasons why people choose to go through hoops installing their own self-hosted wordpress blogs instead of using other free blog services. And one of those cool things is the wordpress tag cloud plugin.

For those who are unfamiliar with tag cloud, it is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus, both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible.

This is what a wordpress tag cloud plugin looks like:

I never really put much attention to tag cloud, but one recent discovery altered the path of my focus a little bit.

It’s (not) gonna rain

What I discovered was a tag cloud with a twist – literally. What made it different from ordinary tag clouds was the way the content of the cloud twisted around in 3D. I personally thought that it was cool and it added the visual richness of the blog. Translation: I wanted it.

Problem was, I didn’t know what it is called and whether or not it will work with WordPress. After some searching and asking around, I finally could exhale a sigh of relief because I found the wordpress tag cloud plugin to produce that kind of effect. The plugin is called WP Cumulus.

With a clear target to pursue, I went directly to the installation process.

Note: This plugin is Flash-based. So, there might be several factors (type of browser, browser plugin, internet connection, etc.) that might cause it not to display properly.

Installing WordPress Plugins

I picked the easiest way to install the plugin. I logged in to my WordPress dashboard and continued to the sidebar. I chose the “Plugins” link and “Add New“.

I did the plugin search, and…

Clicked the “Install Now” button.

After the installation, I chose to activate it directly. But if you want to activate/deactivate it, you can do so from the Plugins page.

Controlling the Cloud

One of the ways to tweak the display options of the wordpress tag cloud plugin is by going to the Tools > Settings > WP Cumulus menu from the sidebar.

There are many tweakable elements including the size of the WP Cumulus box, the font and background color and the rotation speed.

You can show WP Cumulus as part of your blog theme, use it as a widget, or insert it into post and/or pages using simple codes. Look at the plugin’s “Installation” page at WordPress.org for more detailed instruction.

If you want to use it as a widget, you have to make sure that your blog’s theme supports widgets. If it does, go to the Appearance > Widget menu.

You will find the WP-Cumulus item in the widget list. All you have to do is drag it to the widget bar.

WP-Cumulus as a widget also provides its users with settings pane.

Don’t forget to click “Save” after adjusting the settings.

The color of the cloud

You will notice that all the colors used are written in hexadecimal HTML color codes. One trick that you can use to find out which code belongs to which color is to search for it via any application through the options to change the color of its element.

For example, you can use any word processor and begin the steps to change the font color. Then you can use the color palette to search for the color code. For those who work with graphics and images, you can utilize your graphic applications.

Or you could search the web with the search string: “web color code” or “hexadecimal color code” (or something similar).

Life beyond the cloud

Because the WP Cumulus plugin produces moving images, it’s a bit difficult to show it here. To see how this twisting tag cloud looks on a real site, there’s no better place to visit than the plugin creator’s page. The site is also a good place to start finding similar plugins for other blogging platforms.

There are other interesting variations of tag cloud plugins for WordPress. To find out more, you could search for “moving tag cloud” (or other similar search strings) in the Plugins section of WordPress.org.

Do you use tags to enhance your WordPress blog visually? Do you know other cool tag cloud WordPress plugins? Share using the comment below.

Image credit: kevindooley

Auto-Tag Delicious Bookmarks and Share Them Easily On Twitter With Faviki

Mahendra Palsule — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:30:26 +0000

Faviki is a unique social bookmarking service that uses semantic tags based on structured information from Wikipedia. What does that mean, why does it matter, and why should you use another social bookmarking service if you already have hundreds of bookmarks in Delicious?

In this article, let us see why Faviki is an attractive social bookmarking service which makes bookmarking easier, uses smarter tags, and integrates with Delicious as well as Twitter.

What are Semantic Tags?

If you browse the “Avatar” tag in Delicious, you will find that some bookmarks refer to Avatar the movie, while others refer to Avatar as used in Twitter and Clip Art. In other words, Delicious does not know exactly what you mean when you give an “Avatar“ tag to a bookmark. Whereas on Wikipedia, you can see the disambiguation page for Avatar, which shows that Avatar may be a tag that can be used for the 2009 movie, as well as for several other films, graphical representations of people, games, books, and more.

Faviki is a social bookmarking service that uses Wikipedia-style semantic tags, so your tag specifies exactly what you mean when you bookmark something. This open standard format is called Common Tags.

Why Use Faviki?

Faviki uses universal, common tags, that have Wikipedia-defined meanings. Your world of knowledge captured in your bookmarks is universally connected and discoverable to your friends via these semantic tags.
Tagging is simple ““ Faviki suggests tags automatically, also allowing you to clarify exactly what you mean.
You do not need to switch from Delicious. You can import all your bookmarks from Delicious. Bookmarks with semantic-rich information saved in Faviki will automatically be saved in Delicious as well.
Automatically share your bookmarks via Twitter.
Multi-language Support: Faviki is the world’s first and only bookmarking service that supports tagging in 15 languages.

Using the Bookmarklet

Go to the Faviki bookmarklet page to install it in your browser. When you are on a web page you want to bookmark, click the bookmarklet. It shows you suggested tags for that bookmark. You are free to choose from the suggested tags and add your own by typing and selecting from the auto-complete list.

Along with tagging, Faviki also allows you to enter additional information about the bookmark. Click the “edit bookmark >” link to go to a page where you can add your own notes and copy text from the webpage to add to your bookmark. This makes it easy for your friends to discover exactly why you thought the page worth bookmarking.

Semantic Tagging At Work

Suppose I am bookmarking Susan’s article at MakeUseOf on Fedora 12. As Wikipedia shows, Fedora can mean many different things ““ the Linux OS, a 1978 film, or even a KGB agent! When I type “Fedora” in the tagging box of the bookmarklet, I can choose precisely what I mean:

Auto Save to Delicious, Auto Share on Twitter

Go to the Edit Profile page and enter your Delicious and Twitter account information.

You can enable auto save to Delicious and auto sharing on Twitter. You can also specify how tags with spaces, like “Google Chrome”, are handled.

Importing Delicious Bookmarks

You can import all your existing precious collection of bookmarks from Delicious. Faviki will help convert your existing tags into semantic Common Tags. Go to Import from the top menu to add your Delicious account information. After you’re done, click Import Bookmarks to start the import process. Faviki will now import your Delicious bookmarks, analyze your custom tags, and suggest equivalent Common Tags. Here is how Faviki displayed suggestions for my import:

The rows shaded in dark are the tags that you need to correct because Faviki could not find their meaning. In order to clarify what I meant with my “Films” tag, I enter “movie” and click search. Faviki presents a drop-down of search results from Wikipedia, from which I choose the correct meaning ““ “Film”, in this case.

Also, you can see in the above example that my “windows” tag was actually ambiguous since it could have easily meant windows in our homes. Faviki automatically suggested the correct semantic tag in this case – “Microsoft Windows”. What this means is that my MS Windows bookmarks are now easily searchable and shareable with other users interested in MS Windows. Other users who may be searching for home windows will not see these bookmarks.

Review all the dark rows and correct tags as necessary. You can click the “+” sign to expand a row and show all the bookmarks with that tag. When you are done, click the Save and initiate import button. Be patient, the importing can take a long time, and you will be notified by email. Meanwhile, you can continue using Faviki for your new bookmarks!

Does Faviki‘s ability to use semantic tags appeal to you? Do you look forward to giving a whole new meaning to your bookmark collection? Share your thoughts in the comments!

HOW TO: Effectively Use Twitter Hashtags

Steve Campbell — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:31:56 +0000

We’ve all seen the #followfriday or #musicmonday memes on Twitter, as well as others every day in the Trending Topics section, but what’s with the little “˜pound’ symbol (#) that they all seem to have?

Those are called hashtags, and they are often misunderstood by new members of the Twitter community. So, what are they exactly? In this article we will take a look at what hashtags are, how to use them, and what they can do for you.

Hashtags ““ Background & How-To

In our Twitter manual Twitter: Best Practices and Tips [PDF Guide], we stated that “a hashtag is the Twitter equivalent of metadata on a message”. This means that hashtags are like keywords, and by appending tags to your tweets they will be easier to find within Twitter. Let me explain.

Say I want to write a tweet about MUO’s article on hashtags:

Everyone will be able to see my tweet but what if I wanted a specific group, like the MakeUseOf community, to be able to find it easily? Using a hashtag simplifies this.

Now everyone searching for MakeUseOf will be able to see the article. If people find the article interesting and want to tweet about it they only need to include the #makeuseof tag at the end of their tweets and everyone will be able to follow the conversation surrounding the article.

Hashtags are generally placed at the end of a tweet. Like keywords, you can attach multiple tags to your tweets. Hashtags are sometimes abbreviated (#followfriday or #FF) for ease of use.

How To Find Popular Hashtags

There are many various websites/directories to help you utilize hashtags in your tweets. One of the best tools for finding tags is Twubs.

Twubs is a website comprised of Twitter groups, and these groups are built around aggregated content from hashtags. There is no shortage of tags on Twubs. You can view the most popular listings on the front page or by category.

Let’s say you want to find a hashtag to use that is Internet-related. Just go to the Categories section and click on Internet. Each category has several tags to choose from. The Internet category for example has tags for #facebook, #twitter, and #socialmedia. Not sure which category your hashtag is in? You can search keywords within Twubs as well.

What if your desired hashtag is not listed in Twubs or no one has written a description for it? You can register it yourself! Just click Register Your Hashtag!, enter your tag into the box, and click Check Availability. Registering a hashtag minimizes the likelihood of using a tag that is already taken, as well as preventing others from using your tag. This helps keep the conversation central and it reduces clutter.

Tracking The Conversation

Once you find a hashtag/keyword worth using, you can start tracking the conversation around it. By chatting with tags you are more likely to find like-minded people on Twitter who share the same passions and interests as you. Twubs has this function built in, but there are tools better suited for this task. You can start viewing the conversation with these utilities:

TweetChat

TweetChat offers a really simple way to monitor a hashtag. All you do is type in your tag and hit Go >>. You are then taken to a screen where your results are updated in real-time. You can control the speed of the results scrolling by and even pause them. If you sign in with your Twitter username and password you can type your messages (with tags) right from within TweetChat. It is a great way to maintain a Twitter conversation.

Twitterfall

Twitterfall offers a unique way of tracking more than one hashtag at a time. Type your keywords into the search box and results start cascading down the page. You can change the speed, pause results, and choose whether or not to show re-tweets. Twitterfall also lets you show tweets based on geographical location and exclude certain terms from your results. You can even color-code your searches to help keep track.

Marketing With Hashtags

Hashtags can be used for all sorts of marketing reasons: news (#h1n1, #iranelection), political campaigns (#obama), events, tweetups, contests, and giveaways just to name a few. Companies rely on hashtags to generate buzz about their products and services, also.

Usage of hashtags can be an effective marketing strategy in that it allows them to start a conversation and chat with potential clients/customers in a real-time Twitter-based environment. This also allows them to be more creative with their marketing strategy. Events and contests carry hashtags to help promote their products and send more traffic to their online stores and product pages. It is a cost effective way of marketing and building brand recognition.

What does this mean for you, the consumer? Knowledge of hashtags grants you the power to navigate Twitter in search of better #deals and #prize giveaways. If you are looking for a specific product or brand, see if there are any hashtags for that brand. A little research can go a long way!

Still Don’t Know What Hashtags Are?

As you can see, hashtags have many uses in the Twittersphere. They allow you to track trending topics, host conversations with like-minded Twitterers, and market your brand to the masses. Hopefully reading this article has alleviated some of the mysteries surrounding these tags and maybe is a call-to-action to start using them to your own benefit.

Using any other cool utilities to manage your hashtags? Leave a comment about them, along with your other opinions, thoughts, and ideas!