Second-generation open-tagging system for sharing multimedia, links, files, and blogs in a way that allows users to annotate them as belonging to shareable categories:

“TagWorld is helping build the Social Web by providing a unified set of easy-to-use, web-based services that will let users create and engage in a more meaningful, social experience.
        The Social Web empowers people’s ability to engage in self-expression and communicate and share information with whomever they choose. As the Internet’s influence evolves, a new social phase is emerging that calls for enabling people to place and have access to a broad range of personal information that they wish to place on the web. To support users, TagWorld sees five fundamental components for building out this new social web infrastructure: people, photos, blogs, tags and storage.” (from About on TagWorld site)

Starter Links: TagWorld home page | PC Magazine review

One of the paradigm-setting open-tagging systems that allows users to share links to “favorite” online resources and annotate them as belonging to particular categories of interest:

“del.icio.us is a collection of favorites – yours and everyone else’s. Use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.

• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite – they’ve already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.” (from About on del.icio.us site)

  Starter Links: del.icio.us home page

Paradigm-seting open-tagging system for organizing and sharing photos. Though it does not bear directly on the Transliteracies problem of online reading, Flickr is relevant because it helped establish the model for open, shareable metadata—that is, for allowing users to annotate online resources in common:

“Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your photos – not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes around the photos as metadata, you can find them so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.” (from About Flickr on Flickr site)

Starter Links: Flickr home page