New image recognition webapp ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time) is a on a mission to assign relevant tags to digital images based on their content, and wants you to help it learn. While digital image recognition has come a long way in recent years, it's still got a long way to go, and ALIPR's got its share of hits and misses. Upload an image to ALIPR or hand it a URL of an image already online, and the engine will suggest tags, and ask you to add to its list. Some of ALIPR's suggestions are spot-on, but others are way off. You can confirm the hits and suggest other tags to help the engine learn. Check out how ALIPR did with a few images from my Flickr photostream.

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Windows only: Rename the thousands of MP3 files in your digital music library and add or edit tags, lyrics, and album art in one fell swoop with free utility TagScanner. Not only can TagScanner clean up the artist, album, song title, and track number information for your digital music files, it can rename your songs based on a pattern you define (like %artist% - %title%), it can make music playlists, and search online databases like freedb and Amazon to automatically tag music missing information. It includes a built-in player as well so you can listen to tracks while you edit. We've recommended Media Monkey to whip your music's metadata into shape, but TagScanner looks like a solid alternative. TagScanner is a free download for Windows only.

Blogger and information junkie Steve Rubel details how he uses Gmail as a taggable, searchable knowledge base using previously mentioned tricks and tools like Gmail plus addresses, the Ubiquity Firefox extension, and Gmail Labs Quick Links. It's a fantastic system, not only because it works perfectly with apps you already live in (namely Gmail), but also because you can save and tag an entire web page in a few keystrokes. Likewise, you can access the information quickly and easily with Gmail's excellent search. I recently detailed how you can expand your brain with Evernote, a free, cross-platform note-taking application, but if you live and breath Gmail, Rubel's methods (which improve on similar Gmail solutions we've seen before) are worth a try.

Google's Picasa is seeing updates on both the web- and desktop-based versions of the popular photo management application. The biggest new feature is coming to Picasa Web Albums in the form of people tagging, a Facebook-style tool that lets you tag faces in your photos by name and then view pictures of that person by simply searching. The difference between this and Facebook is that Google identifies all of the faces in your pictures automatically and groups together the faces that it thinks are the same, making people tagging extremely quick and easy to do. According to technology web site CNET, Google will also be releasing a new beta version of Picasa for the desktop today, the main improvements to which include a movie maker and online synchronisation of every edit of a photo. The download isn't showing up for me yet, but people tagging is live, so give it a try and let's hear what you think in the comments.

Web utility del.icio.us to Firefox merges your bookmarks from social bookmarking web site del.icio.us—tags and all—with your existing Firefox 3 bookmarks. Why might you want to do this? Because the new and improved bookmarking functionality in Firefox 3 supports tagging, but since previous versions of Firefox did not, you've already got tons of bookmarks with no tags.

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Now that you know how to stitch together panoramic photos with free software, publish your creations at Panoye, a panoramic sharing web site. Panoye users are building "a virtual tour all around Earth" with user-submitted panoramic images. Upload, tag, geotag, and share your panoramas on Panoye, which offers YouTube-like HTML markup to embed a pannable panoramic image onto your own web site, like the one after the jump:

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Blogger Dennis Best, who previously schooled us about the value of built-in Getting Things Done apps, expands on his all-inside-the-Mac thinking by noting a simple way to organise every email message, document, iCal event, or other file. Add the ° character (Shift-Option-8 on Mac keyboards) directly in front of any word you want to track with, and both Spotlight (and, of course, Quicksilver) can quickly catch and sort your keywords for you. Guest poster Nick Santilli suggested a similar metada system using the "&" character, but Dennis' idea tags files by adding only a single, non-intrusive step you can do right inside the text.

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Linux only: Tag and organise documents of nearly any kind and generate complete bibliographies with Referencer, a free utility for Linux systems. PDF files, office documents, saved web pages, and whatever else you have laying around can be tagged and organised, and you can enter the metadata needed for a bibliography report by hand, or have Referencer jump onto arXiv, PubMed, or CrossRe to see if any titles match up with what you're looking at. For those with a lot of nested folders' worth of documents or anyone harnessing Tux's power for academic pursuits, Referencer can be a great tool and freak-out-preventer. Referencer is a free download, available as source and pre-compiled for many Linux distributions.

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Windows only: Freeware application Netlicious is a desktop Del.icio.us client from which you can view and manage all of your Del.cio.us bookmarks. The application is set up very much like a traditional desktop newsreader or email application, with all your tags in the left sidebar, individual bookmarks in a top pane, and a browser preview for bookmarks below that. Netlicious makes viewing or editing your bookmarks a breeze, with a quick search integration and everything else you'd want from a desktop Del.icio.us tool. Netlicious is freeware beta application, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.

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With the popularity of sites like del.icio.us and YouTube, tagging has become (for better or sometimes worse) a standard feature of nearly every site on the internet, and virtually everyone has a pretty fair idea what tagging is and how to use tags online. But the latest operating systems from Apple and Microsoft also have tagging built into their filesystems, meaning that the same basic tagging ideas available online are also available for the files on your hard drive. It sounds like an excellent idea in theory, but it doesn't seem as though offline tagging is taking hold. So we're wondering:

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