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 🙂

Tags: blakepics, gallery2, technology, web design