Just been playing with the new geotagging feature in Flickr. It’s good fun, but the poor quality of the maps really let it down. It’s impossible to accurately pinpoint where anything actually is, particularly since roads are most straight lines and railways often wander out into the sea.

Place names are pretty bad aswell: Burntisland is named correctly, but it is next to a non-existant town called Birntisland! Kirkcaldy isn’t named at all, and Dunkeld and Birnam have merged to become Dunkeld-Birnam. It’s just as well this tool exists then!

Update: I’ve found Kirkcaldy on Yahoo!’s map — in completely the wrong place.

I signed up to Six Apart’s funny new blogging / social network service, Vox (thanks to Sarah for the invite!). Is it LiveJournal for grownups? Is it MySpace without the emo kids? We just don’t know.

Here is my page on Vox. I’m not exactly sure that I’ll ever use it, given that I surely have about a dozen blogs of some form or another and I wasn’t exactly itching to get a new one. But, you know, I am a curious guy and I wanted to take a look.

So what do I think of it? It’s certainly pretty solid. It impressed me in a way that, for instance, MySpace and Bebo just didn’t. Infact, MySpace and Bebo both repelled me at first, which Vox hasn’t. And if I were to sit here today making a choice between LiveJournal and Vox, I would probably opt for Vox. But as I have already been using a LiveJournal account for a while now, I’m probably going to stick with that for the time being.

Here is one thing I really like about Vox already. There is also a quaint little feature that really does make Vox feel like a community: ‘Question of the day’. On the front page there is a question which you are encouraged to answer on your blog. You can view my response to today’s question here.

A lot of newcomers to blogging find it really hard to keep thinking of things to write, or even to remember to update their blog in the first place. QotD will probably encourage a lot of people to update their blogs. It might be a bit contrived and whimsical, but QotD would encourage me to post often, and it would also make me feel part of a community.

The Flickr integration is pretty cool. You can associate your Vox account with your Flickr account. From there you can easily insert a photo from Flickr into a blog post. Very nice. But there are a few features on Vox that I don’t quite understand yet. There are options such as ‘audio’, ‘video’ and ‘books’ which I don’t really understand. Are these just to let people know what’s floating your boat at the moment? Seems a tad pointless.

Also, the WYSIWYG post editor is quite annoying. I know that it is probably there because Vox is supposed to be aimed at not-so-tech-savvy people, but is there not a way to turn the WYSIWYG function off? Because I couldn’t find it.

Here is what Currybet thought of Vox.

I also have an invite to give out already. So if you want to take a look at Vox aswell, just let me know in the comments of via email and I’ll send you that invite.

There is an interesting post at canspice.org about tagging (not to be confused with the tagging that you get with memes).

Tagging already has a couple of well-known problems. One of the major ones is the confusion over whether you should use singular or plural. Flickr cleverly bypassed the other problem — words such as ‘bush’ that have two meanings — by creating clusters.

Tagging is about as trendy as it gets these days. You’re setting up a website — but if it hasn’t got tagging involved somewhere, you can take your arse right out of Web 2.0. We don’t need the likes of you around here.

The problem is that each site implements tags completely differently. The plugin that I use to tag posts on my blog automatically converts hyphens into spaces so that when, for instance, somebody searches for ‘formula 1‘ on Technorati, the posts that I tagged with ‘formula-1′ will appear.

Flickr is slightly more restrictive. Spaces are allowed, but you’ve got to stick quotation marks around any tags with more than one word.

del.icio.us is even more restrictive — it won’t let you use spaces at all. So I decided to use the next best thing, which in my view was the hyphen. Unfortunately, most people seem to use what Brad at canspice.org calls the mashup technique. Search for ‘formula-1‘ on del.icio.us and just about all of the entries are posted by me; searching for ‘formula1‘ brings up far more links.

Brad outlined why he thinks more people should use hyphens rather than underscores or the ‘mashup’ technique. The problem is, with the whole tagging idea being that it’s driven from the bottom-up, it’s going to be difficult to get everybody using a standard.

Do many people actually care about tags anyway though?

Us bloggers, eh?

Why Do Taggers Tag?

• Recognition
• Low self-esteem
• Peer recognition
• For recognition; a distorted view of “fame”
• See it in the community and want to try it too

Hilariously, this list applies equally to graffiti.

Warning, this one’s quite addictive. Fastr, a game based on Flickr where you have to guess the tag as quickly as possible. (Via)