Wednesday 22 July 2009

Tag procrastination

Minutes spent procrastinating with Tag Galaxy: 40 (bad); Galaxies revolving around S. Yoshikawa: 1 (good)

A RL friend directed me to Tag Galaxy at http://www.taggalaxy.com/
Initial impression: Cool. You type in words and phrases, and it matches them with Flickr tags. At first thought that you couldn't do phrases, since it mirrors back the phrase with spaces taken out, but here is the galaxy formed of Sheila Yoshikawa tagged items in Flickr (847 of them, all by me presumably). You can spin the globe (wheeeeeee), or click on a photo to bring it up in size.
With some v. popular terms you get some related tags pictured as satellites. It isn't at all clear how this works (e.g. all my pics on Flickr have more than one tag, so the Sheila Yoshikawa ones all have SL and Second Life as well, & lots have Infolit iSchool, but Sheila Yoshikawa doesn't have any satellites pictured). So perhaps not quite as cool as first thought. Also SL satellites include Second and Life which implies rather simplistic approach to tag association.
Googling the designer's name revealed that everyone ELSE had been saying how cool this was in MAY, and my interest ran out long before managed to find more info on how this coursework/ dissertation project actually worked. However if you need yet another thing to waste your time today, going to http://www.taggalaxy.com/ and typing in a random word may be the answer.

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The blog of Sheila Yoshikawa on her adventures in Second Life. This may be very thrilling. Or possibly not.