It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure

So said Clay Shirky . . . recently I read about a site that seems to help. Alltop is a site that has been designed to allow you to find out what’s going on in various different topics on the web that you can browse by categories or search using keywords. There is often just too much information on the web to easily keep up and staying up to date and sifting through it all can be very difficult. Alltop can help as all of your topics are updated every hour. Alltop can be compared to a search engine but Alltop is different from a search engine by the way it collects the headlines of the latest stories from sites and blogs and aggregates this into individual web pages. Alltop describe themselves as the “online magazine rack” of the web. They subscribed to thousands of sources to display stories from sources that you’re probably already visiting, puts them in one place, plus helps you discover new sources for subjects you are interested in. Alltop is free and to register you just need to choose a username, password and also enter a valid email address . The username you choose will also be used as your URL to access your personal account. Alltop was founded in March 2008 by Guy Kawasaki, Will Mayall, and Kathryn Henkens. You can see an example I created at http://my.alltop.com/rhino128

Keywords for Photography

I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom its a photography software program developed by Adobe, designed to assist photographers in managing digital images and doing post production work. It is not a file browser but rather an image management application database which helps in viewing, editing, and managing digital photos. When you start to get a lot of images in Lightroom, you will want to search and categorise them for all sorts of reasons. Keyword lists for Lightroom are TAGS that are embedded in the EXIF data in images. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, and is a standard for storing interchange information in image files. The EXIF data can be viewed using image editing programs. Alos Flickr and other photo sharing online communities display EXIF data (if available) alongside images, that also means that you can peek at the camera settings used by professional photographers and this is a very valuable learning tool. So why use keyword lists in the first place? Well, auto completion is a good reason, as it saves typing. Also when you run through a specific structured list, it helps keep your keywords tidy. Photographer Nick Potter has created a set of free Keyword lists for Lightroom. The lists cover Geography, Animals, Colours, Natural Landforms and Bodies of Water. While not proclaimed as a comprehensive list, it id FREE and you need to buy a more comprehensive list from say, the Controlled Vocabulary created by David Riecks for example.

I use keywords and looking at your categories can tell you a lot about the photos you take. I end up with a list of categories, all which do contain from 5 to 30 sub categories along the following keywords

[Animals] - [Art] - [Buildings] - [Colour] - [Family] - [Festival] - [Food] - [Geography] - [Photography] - [Plants] - [Season] - [Sky] - [Sport] - [Technology] - [Transport] - [Water]

Of course if you want to sell your images as stock photos you could use these keywords to make your images more easily indexed and found by perspective buyers.