What's with Gmail?

I just can't get the hang of Gmail. I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep their inbox very clean, even though I create lots of folders that help me file away emails for future perusal (for example, at work I use Eudora. I have 369 emails in my inbox, 26 folders [i.e. mailboxes], and about 86 sub-folders).

So, yeah, Gmail is all about search, not filing. But I can't help myself. If they didn't want us to file, why did they give us labels? OK, so I guess I'm supposed to treat labels like tags or keywords, and stop thinking of them as folders. Problem is, they're listed on the left side of my screen and dagnabit they sure look a lot like folders. So periodically I have an overwhelming urge to get some of the crap out of my inbox and I dutifully go about selecting emails, giving them labels, and then archiving them to remove them from my inbox. Uh, talk about labor intensive! I need drag and drop bad.

Countries I've Visited

This is kind of cool.



create your own visited countries map

Orkutians on Flickr

I had no idea. All of the basic beautiful people from Orkut are over on Flickr. I found this out from Henrik, who committed Orkutcide. Then I found Adam Rifkin's contacts and browsed them and so many of the old gang are there, and are kindly using their same old handles. Flickr is good for photos, but not so good for Social Networking though. I can't figure out stuff like where to write people Testimonials or even how to view their contacts - I had to reverse engineer the URL for that. I'm sure it's in there, but you have to be in the right part of the site to navigate to other parts. Anyway, it was still cool to see everybody there.

Tags of the Commons

I post my photos on Flickr. Like del.icio.us, there's the tag thing. And you can view the "most common tags". And this just strikes me as a very good way to suss out the best keywords for search within a given user environment. I mean, on Flickr, it becomes very clear that beach, wedding, family, and friends are going to work for people as tags. Of course there are authority problems. Some people use cat, some people use cats. That's probably the main difference between librarians and computer people. Computer people prefer to find a way around the messiness without cleaning it up: just make sure people know there's the "cat" tag and the "cats" tag. Or program it so results for both come up. Librarians have a hard time constraining the impulse to force people to choose a discrete tag. Librarians would probably ask the programmers, "can you make a little pop-up note that tells the user, 'you wanted to tag this as cat - please use the tag cats instead.' "

I like the visual Flickr uses, when you look at "popular" tags, or your own tags, or someone elses tags, it shows you which ones have the most photos associated with them by using size.

Wow, clusters. Flickr has a new thing called clusters. You check out all the photos people have tagged with "Red", then you can view clusters related to red. All the photos that were tagged "strawberry" or "autumn" in addition to "red". I am to be liking this.

UPDATE: OK, I guess I am just an idiot - no, I am just out of touch. Apparently there is actually a name for the whole phenomenon of user-created tags. Either that or Adam Rifkin coined it, but he has a delicious tag called "Folksonomies". I really need to keep up. But that's not likely to happen now that I'm a Mom.

ADDITIONAL MUSINGS: OK, so one problematic thing about these tags is how people handle phrases. Some use social_networking, some use social-networking, some use socialnetworking. So, again, there has to be a way to either bring similar tags together or exert authority control. Otherwise, valuable categorization work is lost, or subject to the vagaries of serendipity (which is not altogether a bad thing, but messy).

Lost Hit Counter

Apparently my hit counter got re-set somehow. Maybe I should use a different one.