tagging

Ford tag-teams HD Radio, iTunes tagging

Ford Motor just can't seem to get enough lately of high-tech flourishes for the dashboard.

Earlier this month, the automaker unveiled plans to integrate Wi-Fi into its Sync entertainment systems so that drivers can turn their cars into wireless Internet hot spots. On Tuesday, Ford said that starting in 2010, car buyers will be able to get a factory-installed HD Radio receiver with iTunes Tagging capabilities:

"Through the Sync system," Ford said in its press release, "iTunes Tagging will provide Ford customers with the ability to capture a song they hear on the HD Radio receiver … Read more

Bookmark manager

Delicious Bookmarks is an add-on for Firefox that functions as a virtual filing cabinet for your bookmarks. If you love surfing the Internet, this tool will help you organize your bookmarks and discover new sites of interest.

Delicious Bookmarks shows its value as soon as we installed it. Since we weren't familiar with Delicious Bookmarks, we went to the About section of the product's Web site and found what we needed to get started, plus plenty of other great information. To use Delicious Bookmarks, you need an account with Delicious, which is part of Yahoo, so if you … Read more

Hulu adds tagging for movies, TV shows

Movie and TV show streaming service Hulu on Monday added tagging to the mix, allowing users to add up to 30 tags to each piece of content for the sake of organization. These tags also work site-wide, which means that users can see all types of related content regardless of whether it's a TV show or feature-length film.

Users have two choices for tagging: one is creating an all-new tag, while the other is to vote up a tag someone else has made. Each time a user does this it adds to the number, giving certain tags more validity, … Read more

Lamborghini phone will drive you to poor house

If you like fast cars, you might get revved up by the Meridiist phone from luxury sports watch maker Tag Heuer. The company has teamed with Italian super sports car manufacturer Lamborghini to create the limited-edition phone, which flashes fancy dual LCD displays made from 60.5 carats of scratch-resistant sapphire crystal.

The phone's design references the Lamborghini Murcielago down to its signature on the battery cover--the same one as on the Murcielago LP 640's V12 engine block. The device has a hand-brushed stainless steel case and backlit mechanical stainless steel keypad customized with Automobili Lamborghini's trademark … Read more

Flickr gets personal with people tagging

Social photo-sharing site Flickr is adding a long overdue feature this week that lets users assign a name tag to people in photos. While the service is overflowing with photos of sweeping landscapes and close-ups of bug eyeballs, the Yahoo-owned company has noticed that many of its users are simply using it to share shots of friends and family, and that the existing tag tools were not made with people in mind.

The new system has been designed as a hybrid of the original tagging tools and Flickr's notes feature, all wrapped up into one. Users can tag a … Read more

RSS fans rejoice: FeedDemon 3 is out

FeedDemon 3 is ready for public use, after months spent in a beta version that saw a confusing migration from proprietary online syncing to Google Reader.

That rough patch sorted, FeedDemon remains one of the best desktop RSS and Atom feed catchers. This version contains a lengthy list of changes, including greatly enhanced Twitter connectivity, a tweaked interface that's a bit easier to use, and better tagging and sharing.

FeedDemon has dumped its proprietary synchronization site, Newsgator.com, in favor of syncing with Google Reader. New users won't notice, but older users are likely to lose many unread … Read more

Augmented reality augurs the future of toys

I have seen the future of toys, and it is augmented reality.

That was my conclusion Monday after seeing Mattel's i-Tags, new technology that will be included with action figures the company will make for "Titanic" director James Cameron's new film, "Avatar."

For those not familiar with augmented reality, it's an overlay of digital information or imagery on top of real-world objects. AR, as it's known, "is a field of computer research that deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into … Read more

Unintuitive tagging program

Tagged Frog allows users to organize documents, images, links, and more using tags. Although we like the idea behind the program, its interface left us scratching our heads.

Aesthetically, the interface is pleasing, with a sleek and simple design. And we like the idea behind the program--how many times have we wished for a way to search for a document using a keyword? Despite Tagged Frog's potential usefulness, however, it's not particularly intuitive. Users are able to drag and drop items that they'd like to tag, which is nice, and the tagging process is simple enough. The … Read more

Photo tag 'face-off' proves vanity reigns supreme

I recently went on a nice, long vacation, and the first thing I did when I got back was to upload some of the best 200 or so photos I had taken.

As an experiment, I uploaded many of the same shots to two services--Flickr and Facebook. Both let users tag photos, so I wanted to see which ones would get tagged first, and not by me.

The winner? Facebook.

Just an hour or two after having uploaded to both services, all of my 88 shots on Facebook had been tagged. The most amazing part is that very few of them were tagged by me. Right after my upload, I tagged a handful of them, which in turn alerted those users to view the shots. From there, they (not me) went on to tag some more of my photos, continuing the cycle.

Flickr, on the other hand, was a different story. I uploaded close to 200 photos to the service. There were still the same shots of the same people, but there were also additional shots of landscapes or nature. Of those shots, only a handful were tagged, and only by one user--my colleague Stephen Shankland, whom I had pestered to look at my artistic capturing of sand castles. His tags weren't even of people; instead, he added descriptive keywords about the photos.

Now, to be fair, I have far more friends on Facebook than I do on Flickr--more than eight times the number to be exact. But in terms of photo usage, my Flickr activity far outweighs what I do on Facebook. I've only created 37 albums on Facebook which contain a total of 532 photos. On Flickr, I have 101 photo sets (Flickr's nickname for albums) which total 3,438 photos. More importantly, anyone on Flickr can see the photos I've uploaded, not just people I've put on a friends list.

In terms of use, the sites are quite different, too. Facebook may have gotten into the photo arena a little later than Flickr, but it's quickly outpaced it. The company says it's getting 900 million photos uploaded each month from its more than 200 million users, whereas Flickr's official numbers put that number somewhere around 90 million uploads from some 40 million registered users. Just keep in mind those 200 million Facebook users are probably not using the site specifically for photo hosting like they are on Flickr.

A tale of two tags

So why are Flickr users so hesitant to tag other people's photos? There are many reasons, but the biggest is that the two tagging systems are just plain… Read more