![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
More than a gigantic bazaar or auction-house, the web is a medium to connect people. Some of the most successful innovations on the web are Amazon's book reviews, eBay's feeback, MySpace or Facebook social networking, and blog commenting. More recently, services such as Flickr.com and del.icio.us, and formats like RSS have enabled this collaboration and sharing to extend to to new areas.
Flickr.com enables users to comment other's pictures, and rank them as interesting or favorites. When you upload pictures you add tags to them that enables others to find them easily (such as Family, Christmas, or FMARS in my case). Thus, by searching for the Iraq tag I was able to see people's favorite pictures from Iraq, and got a much more interesting view of the war than any traditional news outlet has provided. Plus, they provide unlimited storage if you pay them $25/year, which is an amazingly cheap price to have all of your pictures online, accessible from anywhere, at full resolution!
Del.icio.us is a free service that allows you to post your bookmarks to a webpage so that you have them anywhere you go. Again, by putting tags on them (such as "Daily Blogs Friends" for the five blogs I read every day from my friends) allows you to sort them easily. Also, every site that you link to then says how many other del.icio.us users are linked there. So, you can browse people with similar interests, and get a totally different view of the web.
Along with my Livejournal, I am going to embed my Flickr account and my del.icio.us bookmarks in my personal webpage (coming soon), so that I can update my blog, photos and bookmarks as easily and cheaply as possible. It's amazing to me how much more advanced these tools are than a few years ago! So, within a week or so, I'll post the link to my website so that you can read my LiveJournal there if you wish, or of course, it will still be accessible here. I will also be using RSS (really simple syndication), to syndicate the most recent blog entries of my friends on my own site out of frustration that LiveJournal and MySpace are not compatible directly. So, a page labeled "Friends Blogs" on my website will show the recent blog entries of you folks.
My website will have some other stuff, of course. Like a CV/Resume, publications list, bio, and probably some other good stuff besides. So, look forward that soon!
Anonymous
August 30 2005, 11:53:45 UTC 6 years ago
-Tom
That's pretty sweet. I am ashamed to say that I don't actually know what RSS is. People have been hounding me to update tomandari.com since it's been over a year and desperately needs to be updated.................................