serial consign

Over the last month I've been beta testing a number of social bookmarking and database projects. With new web applications you can always tell if a project is on to something if use of the service creeps into your daily workflow without your noticing. One new service I'm really enjoying is ffffound!, an image bookmarking site that exists somewhere between the worlds of del.ici.ous and flickr. The project is described as:

...web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience.

fffound! succeeds for the same reason that del.icio.us does, the bookmarking process is transparent, and the site interface for browsing archived images is simple and versatile.

[image: screen capture of the ffffound! UI with "related images" thumbnails on the right]

If you take a look at my ffffound! profile you can view the image archive as a list (with related thumbnails at the side) or via a thumbnail gallery. If you select a specific image, you get a list of all the users that have bookmarked that image and the system cross references their collections to make suggestions as to other material that you may enjoy. I really love the minimal interface and the lack of tags as they make browsing ffffound! an exercise in simplicity. The images thus far archived by the ffffound! community are quite promising, so It goes without say that I'm quite excited to watch this project develop.

If you are interested in this project, I have two invites available and would be happy to send them the way of whoever contacts me first. Mike Migurski of Stamen wrote a fairly detailed review of ffffound! a few weeks ago that is also worth taking a look at if you want another perspective on the project.

[image: screen capture of an image being bookmarked on bldgblog]

Of all the social media making waves at the moment, I still contend that social bookmarking is the most interesting. I love the idea of organization emerging through the idiosyncrasies of multiple collaborators. Beyond that, participating in social bookmarking forces users to confront their personal logic (or lack thereof) in categorizing and managing a body of information. I just learned about a really fantastic application that can be used to map and navigate a del.icio.us database. This project, called 6pli is not the first visualization to capitalize on del.icio.us data, but it is the most intuitive and dynamic that I have seen yet.

The image above is a 6pli visualization of the bookmarked links and bundles (tag categories) in orbit around a link to transmediale.de. You can see quite clearly the network of associated links (ars electronica, intelligent agent magazine, c-base reconstruction project, etc.) that form a constellation that is driven by the use of similar tags (berlin, architecture, sound, etc.). There are a number of potential configurations for a 6pli visualization and they can be manipulated and navigated on screen. So in the example above I could centre the display around the tag festival, then the link for todaysart festival, then the tag for music, then the link to the midi skirt project, and so on. The ability to spatialize this information, move through it, and interact with it is extremely compelling; I think I've spent about three hours this week exploring my links with 6pli.

6pli is still alpha testing but if you are interested in taking this application for a test drive, check out 6pli.com/serial_consign. Beyond that you can contact the developer of the program, software artist Santiago Ortiz, through the project site to get access to 6pli (provided you have a del.icio.us account). Santiago's personal site is also worth looking at as he has an impressive portfolio of work which includes Hipercontrol^3, another project exploring the networks created through social bookmarking.

[via architectradure]