Archive for March, 2007

We seek them here, we seek them there

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

I’ve recently signed up to yet another social networking site. Not only are “they” following me through my Tesco’s clubcard, tracking my progress across Europe with RFID euros, and circumventing all my efforts with this tin-foil-hat through the magic of VISA - I am now wilfully sending them messages every time I change my status to something like “walking to the other room”", or “sleeping”. And as I was adding my web site addresses to my profile, I realised there was a number of ways to find me on the Internet…

I run a really useful statistics program on my blog’s web logs, because I like looking at things like that when it produces coloured graphs. It also tells me what people have searched for, in order to find me. More often than not - it’s people searching for “words that rhyme with…” something. And this month is no different, so I want to share some of them because they make you think “why do you want a word that rhymes with that?” …

  • what are some words that rhyme with biscuit
  • words that rhyme with innocent
  • words that rhyme with kevin
  • words that rhyme with vicky
  • words that rhyme with festival
  • words that rhyme with subway
  • things that rhyme with blog
  • words that rhyme with homo
  • words that dont rhyme with anything
  • words that rhyme with marmite
  • words that rhyme with 2007

It amazes me, and interests me that there may well be poets out there, looking for these rhyming words to finish their masterpiece. So if you can help, please leave a comment.

Gallery Tagging and Web X.0

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

Flickr’s had some really quite cool tagging facilities for quite some time now. In this day and age, it’s not enough to put something on the web. Anyone with AOL Website Builder can do that (and sadly, they do). The Semantic Web is all the rage now. You need to be embrace it if you’re going to be part of the the hip crowd of Web 2.0. Or is that for Web 3.0? I forget.

We’ve always had keywords, the meta content for your pages to help search engines out in finding your content. But that just doesn’t cut it any more. Nowadays you have be tagged or labelled, dynamic, geographically aware, mash-up your own content with a multitude of other sites, bleed ajax from your eyeballs, stay mobile, accessible, interactive, and generally ensure that no two-visits to your site are ever exactly the same. If you’re not achieving that quite frankly - you’re terribly 1.0, and I’m afraid - nobody.

So imagine my excitement when I heard the news that Gallery the leviathan behind Blakepics was going to be making more use of the beloved photo keywords, not just for search - but in a Flick-esque, semantic, ever-evolving keyword extravaganza. If this was excitement, then I was feeling it. After a long wait, and drooling over alphas, betas and release candidates - the dream has been made a reality, and the wait is finally over.

So, I now have the ability to supplement my standard albums with dynamic ones. Photos of Christmas in London can now be a part of both the Christmas and London “albums”. Dynamic albums showing off all the llamas, no matter where I saw them, or holidays, europe, america, mobile phone pictures. This has also introduced the keyword “cloud” at the bottom of every page, which not only gives a way of seeing the albums, but which keywords are the most popular.

It’s not the only addition / improvement of course - but it’s one I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time :)