Shadows, Flickr, and Flock – Oh My!

I’ve been using a few new technologies (if you can refer to a website as a “technology”) that I’ve found really useful: Shadows, an on-line bookmark storage site that uses tagging (more on that in a minute); Flickr, an on-line photo storage site that also uses tags; and Flock, a browser that seamlessly integrates both of those sites into an easy-to-use browser.

Tagging

OK — let’s talk about tagging first because it’s used by both the Shadows and Flickr sites (and others). Tagging is way of identifying something by using a few words to describe it. I know, that’s the definition of a definition, not of a tag. The difference is that a definition has to be able to completely describe an object — a tag doesn’t. Let’s take a picture of a lighthouse as an example. If I was to tag that picture I’d probably use a few simple, descriptive terms like “lighthouse” and “beach”. Let’s say that I also have a picture of a wave. I’d tag that picture with “wave” and “beach”. Imagine going through a bunch of pictures from a recent trip and tagging them using simple tags. You could use the names of people in the pictures (like “mom” or “jim”), places (”beach” or “new jersey”), things (”lighthouse” or “wave”) — you get the idea.

Now’s where things get interesting. The real power behind tagging is the way that it helps you find what you’re looking for. Since we took a few minutes to tag the pictures of our trip we can use those tags to help us wade through the pile of pictures from our vacation to find those pictures we’re interested in seeing. Let’s say that we only want to see pictures of Mom standing in front of the lighthouse. If we’ve tagged every picture that had mom with the tag “mom” and every picture that contained the lighthouse with the tag “lighthouse” then it’s easy — we just look for all pictures that have the tags “mom” and “lighthouse”.

The most important thing to remember when tagging is to be consistent. If we tag one picture with “mom” and another with “mother” it makes it harder to find all of the pictures we want to see. The second thing is to not think too much about which words to use when you tag something. I always use the first thing that pops into my head because that’s probably going to be the first thing I think of when I go to search for something. Keep it simple (but consistent). And remember, you can have as many tags as you want for an object, so it’s legal to tag the lighthouse picture with “lighthouse”,”new jersey”,”barnegat”,”old”,”barney”,”beach”… you get the picture.

So now that we understand tagging, let’s take a quick look at Flickr and Shadows.

Flickr

Flickr allows you to upload, tag, and store you photos. You can mark your photos as public, where everyone can see your photos, or private, where only you (or people you designate) can see them. You can arrange your pictures into albums and decide on who (besides yourself) gets to see those albums. If you mark your pictures as public other people can find them if they search using the tags you’ve used. It’s a pretty neat little site.

Shadows

Shadows allows you to use use tags as bookmarks for websites that you visit. Let’s say that I’m searching for a new car. I’m interested in a Ford Mustang so I end up at the Mustang page at the Ford website. I’d tag the page with “car”, “ford”, and “mustang”. I’m also interested in the Ford Explorer so I go to that page and tag it “car”, “ford”, and “explorer”. At the Toyota site I tag a page “car”, “toyota”, and “prius”. I also find a bunch of sites selling accessories I’m interested in and I tag them, too (”prius” and “floormat”, for example). Just like with the example above where we tagged pictures I can use the tags I gave to my bookmarks to help me wade though all of the pages I wanted to keep track of.

I could search through my tags looking for “car” to see the bookmarks of all 3 cars I’d found, or I could search on “car” and “ford” to see the 2 Fords that I’d found, or I could could search on “car” and “prius” to see the Prius page, or just “prius” to see the Prius page and the page with the floormats for the Prius. Simple but very powerful.

The beauty of having your bookmarks stored this way is that you can log into your Shadows account from any computer, using any browser, and have all of your bookmarks available to you.

Flock

So, where does Flock fit into this all of this? Flock is basically a browser that has “hooks” into sites like Shadows and Flickr. The people who designed Flock tried to make the use of these types of sites as seamless as possible by hiding the sites — they all look like they’re just part of the browser. When I find a page a want to save I just hit the “Star” icon and a box pops up where I can enter some tags for the site. When I press “OK” Flock logs itself into my account at Shadows and saves my new bookmark. I could always go to the Shadows site and enter save the bookmark myself but with Flock I can accomplish the same thing much more easily.

Searching for a site is also simple. Just enter a few tags and the browser displays all of your bookmarks that contain those tags.

Flock’s hooks into Flickr are just as impressive. Just drag and drop a picture into the browser and Flock will upload it into your Flickr account.

In addition to Shadows and Flickr there are also hooks for del.icio.us (another tag-driven bookmark site) and PhotoBucket (another photo storage site), with more to come. You can even hook Flock into you blog site and write and edit your blog entries from within the browser (just like I’m doing now). It even has a spell-checker. There’s a lot more to Flock, but you get the idea.

The version of Flock that I’m currently using (0.5.13.2) is considered an “alpha” build but I have very few problems using it as my primary browser. Sure, it crashes every now and then, but I think it’s worth checking out, even at this stage of its development.

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