First there was Flickr, then del.icio.us. Now there's TagWorld

http://www.tagworld.com/-/Main.aspx

First there was Flickr, then del.icio.us. Now there's TagWorld.

Flickr built an online community of photo sharers-a Web environment where not only friends, family, and colleagues, but the Web at large could see your digital images. By encouraging users to tag their photos-and even more, by turning tagging into a kind of online religion-the service created a worldwide photo database that anyone could browse and search by keyword.

Following in Flickr's footsteps, del.icio.us did much the same with bookmarks. TagWorld has gone one step further, letting you tag and share photos and bookmarks, files-even blogs. All from a single Web-based interface.

Famously, Flickr offers a Tags page where you can browse the site's most popular keywords. Click on "Japan," for example, and you can instantly jump from one photo with a tag of "Japan" to another. With TagWorld, though, when you click on a keyword, you can browse not only photos, but bookmarks, blogs, and all sorts of other uploaded content. TagWorld is an apt name.

Joining the community-which has, according to the site, 65,000 users-is wonderfully easy: Simply key in a username and password, and a wizard helps you build a public user profile and Web site, upload your first photos and bookmarks, and post your first blog entry. Once you're done, all this data is accessible from your own URL (on the TagWorld domain).

You can add photos and bookmarks at your leisure, upload files of any kind, and post videos (though, according to the company, copyrighted content will be removed). You can also link your site to those of friends, family, and colleagues.

Editing your site is as easy as dragging and dropping predefined multimedia modules from one place to another. If you'd like to add a video, for instance, you simply drag Tagworld's media player module onto your site and upload the appropriate file. You get up to 1GB of space free. (The service is supported by ads.) Soon you'll be able to purchase additional space, but prices haven't been finalized.

You can browse anyone's site, and anyone can browse yours. You can search for specific content by typing a keyword or two, or you can browse keywords at random via the Tags page. In its continuing effort to build a community, the service keeps a running tab of who visits your site (prominently displaying their photos), and other users are told when you visit their sites.

The site's search capabilities are particularly powerful. After entering a keyword query, you can sort your results in real time using slider controls. If you're looking for other users, for instance, you can limit your search to those of particular ages simply by moving an age slider back and forth.

You do have the option of browsing anonymously so others can't see that you've visited their sites, and you can control who has access to each piece of content you post to your own site. But at the moment, there's no way of controlling access to your entire site. The company says this sort of privacy control is on the way.

If you like, you can subscribe to particular user sites-each time someone posts a new picture, bookmark, file, or blog entry, you'll receive a note. You can't subscribe to individual tags, though-something we'd like to see.

Whether you're fascinated or confused by the new world of Web tagging, it's one you ignore at your own peril. Experts believe it's the future of the Web, and sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and now TagWorld are leading the charge. We recommend you check them out.