Comments on: Flickr Commons: A great idea, but…

By: Ryan Donahue

Ryan Donahue — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:45:57 +0000

Good points raised all around, and as someone who is neck-deep in a cultural heritage institution, I feel the commons allows us to harvest information that traditionally has been difficult to ascertain… perception of the masses, directly from the source.

While it's important to recognize incorrect tags, its also wonderful to be able to see exactly what is wrong. If enough people mis-label a car or a piece of equipment, we've just gained valuable knowledge (some people think this isn't a ford at all, but a chevy) .

It's very meta, in a way, but its interesting nevertheless.

By: mathewi

mathewi — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:39:03 +0000

That's a great example — thanks.

By: S fitz

S fitz — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:31:41 +0000

Search for the word “Brockton” in the Library of Congress photos and you'll see many folks from the city of Brockton chiming in and discussing the photos. They use Google Earth and MSN Live Maps Birdseye view to post current pictures of the locations discussed. That is something the LOC simply could never do efficiently.

By: Ed Kohler

Ed Kohler — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:04:37 +0000

The value of any photo's tags grows as more photos are tagged. For example, in aggregate, typos in tags can can understood and corrected for.

I suppose Flickr could create a certification level for tagging by professional taggers, but I don't think that's going to be necessary.

By: Karoli

Karoli — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:34:03 +0000

Nah, I think you're stretching here. What do you mean by “correct tags” anyway? Shouldn't tags represent what the photo depicts or what value the viewer assigns to it?

Now, in your example with the typo, I really disagree with you, because typos a) happen all the time; and, b) often cause content to go undiscovered as the result of the searcher's typo and the content's correct spelling.

Tags with typos come in handy, more often than you'd think.