Presenting: Buingo.com.

In 2005 Yahoo! acquired Flickr and del.icio.us, both for undisclosed sums. In July the same year, News Corp. acquired MySpace.com for whopping $580 million USD in cash. In October 2006 Google bought YouTube for a respectable $1.6 billion USD in stock and Chad and Steve laughed all the way to the bank. They’re probably still waking up at night laughing until they pee themselves. And someone is probably negotiating for the acquisition of Digg as I’m writing this.

The common factor for all these sites is they are all boosting user-generated content. Hell, del.icio.us is basically just a large collection of tagged links. It seems like the secret to becoming filthy, filthy rich is to get a Web 2.0 community site with user-generated content up and running, get the rumor out there and hope that people are not tired of posting personal stuff about themselves on the interweb.

Enter stage left; Buingo.com. At the moment it’s very, very basic, but if time permits it will pretty soon be my ticket to MTV Cribs. I need another semi-dedicated PHP-programmer for this project. You game? I really need to get the user-handling and sign-up in place. Biggest challenge will probably be the damn time zones. Never liked those.

For all I know there might already be a site exactly like this online. But that I don’t know about it means that they haven’t got people talking about it yet so the race to the Google money is still on.

Now With Even More Tags!

In the past we used to categorize everything. These days, everything is tagged instead, a method brought to the internet by popular Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us and Flickr.

Here’s what your favorite online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has to say about tags:

A web page hosted on a web server or blog server which supports tagging, might have the tags Baseball, Red Sox, Tickets, Away Games, and Discounts. A human reader can probably tell the purpose of the page by quickly scanning the list of tags. Typically, the server would display the tags in a list on that page, with each tag displayed as a web link leading to an index page listing all web pages which use that tag. This allows a reader to locate quickly all pages which have been associated with the term Red Sox. If the server supports tag searching, a reader would be able to find all pages that use a particular set of tags, such as Red Sox and Tickets.

Until yesterday this site was so 2005 and only used categories. But now tags have been introduced. You can even find a tag cloud in the archives. Marvelous!

It’s not much of a tag cloud yet, though, since only two entries are tagged right now, but hopefully I’ll get around to tag everything some day.