mindless ramblings

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Yahoo! took the plunge and acquired del.icio.us to complement their purchase of Vancouver-based Flickr to further their lead in online social bookmarking/sharing. To be honest, I don’t use del.icio.us and Flickr (although I do have a Flickr account), but I suppose that is good news for the other people who do use it. I must say the concept behind both of these sites is very novel, especially the use of tags. I do find Flickr to be an excellent implementation of the tagging system, I’m just too cheap to pay for photo hosting when I could just host it off my own server, albeit without the tags.

I’m kinda slow sometimes when it comes to adopting new technologies. Although I would love to known as an early adopter, it took me quite a while before I started using Bittorrent or more recently, RSS. However, I’m totally converted on both accounts. Everyone knows about Bittorrent, it’s just a pity that Shaw now uses traffic shaping in the Lower Mainland to restrict the volume of BT traffic passing through their networks. Spending that extra $10 on Extreme-I suddenly doesn’t really make all that much sense…

RSS on the other hand, requires little bandwidth and is one of the biggest changes I have made to my web browsing habits over the past couple of months. Before I started using RSS, I would have to click on a whole bunch of bookmarks to have my daily “update” of news. But since most sites worth reading now have RSS feeds, it makes sense to use an application or plugin to consolidate your information gathering and minimize the effort needed to retrieve that information. There’s many RSS readers out there, but the one I use is a Firefox plugin called Sage. It installs in seconds, integrates with any Live Bookmarks you may already have in your bookmarks, and allows you to take advantage of tabbed browsing and all the other goodies that Firefox has. You can even customize the look of feeds by editing a CSS template! I think easy integration into current applications is the way to introduce RSS to the masses. Even Gmail has introduced RSS support, although they call feeds “Clips” for some reason. Maybe one day RSS feeds will take the place of bookmarks, or there will be some kind of combo bookmark/RSS feed system going on, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Looks like AJAX/Web 2.0 applications are the hot stuff now anyway.