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Vacation Photos That Inform Instead of Bore
A News.com story discusses the increasing trend towards adding metadata to casually created content. Their discussion centers around vacation photos taken with increasingly sophisticated cameras, and uploaded to ever more feature-rich websites. These photos, taken on a whim by snap-happy tourists, become invaluable for people wanting to follow in their footsteps. "It's the odd juxtapositions of randomly plotted photos that may be the most surprising--and useful--to travelers with more obscure interests. For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, 'graffiti,' and 'New York City' at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for 'Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti,' for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous 'Neck Face' tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook."
Tags only work when they're properly weighted against the content of the media.
For example, Slashdot edits out various tags claiming abuse and trolls yet tags have not proven themselves to be effective for Slashdot. Now if Slashdot saw that "dupe" was only entered once but "science" or "exoplanets" were entered 10 times then the dupe tag would be easily ignored while the tags added by more responsible participants come to the fore.
Unfortunately Slashdot refuses to acknowledge its paying user base (and ad clicking user base) as adults or peers and the editors must spend a greater amount of time editing nonsensical stuff rather than actually editing submissions like the egregious "Io barfs LOL" one from Zonk.
This is the problem i've had with meta-tagging. Someone uses a tag, and then 500 other people abuse it the second day, and it exponentially compounds so that it's hard to find things again.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I looked up "Selfish disregard for neighborhoods and private property" and came up with those grafitti images. Tagging is the equivalent of a dog pissing on a hydrant but with less creativity.
About ten years ago I read a sci-fi story about a private investigator who had one ace up her sleeve.. She aggregated and mined vacation photos from the web using facial recognition software to track people when they were otherwise off the map. The plot line revolved around tracking someone who appeared in the background in something like two out of several million web-posted photos.
Not a terribly good story, but kinda interesting all the same. The author pointed out that with the number of recording devices constantly on the increase, and the impulse people have to 'share' their photos on the web, it would not require a big brother type scenario to see personal privacy become a thing of the past... even if you take hardcore measures to hide.
Oh, and the suggested google search to find 'neck face' returns a lot more than 99 photos.
Regards.
I'm not known for liking Microsoft, but check Photosynth:
Don't worry, we won't eat you alive even if you liked Microsoft. It's a damn company.
...being informative and being boring are not mutually exclusive. There is no reason vacation photos can't do **both**.
I have a Facebook account, and I'd say at least 3/4 of the pictures uploaded by people I know have each person in a picture tagged, and about half of all pictures have a Description tag filled out. It makes sense, though, seeing as how hundreds upon hundreds of pictures can accumulate. It makes searching later much more convenient.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
Automated tagging, on the other hand, is coming along nicely. Time and location stamping are pretty obvious (and very helpful), but I think within just a few years the software to automatically, accurately retrieve photos of specific people and places will be common as well. Leaving all your photos in a big directory with names like IMG00427.JPG might not be such a problem after all.
Tagging doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. There are infact lots of tourist-photos of grafitti in new-york tagged with "grafitti", so if you're looking for them, it's possible and indeed simple to find them. True enough there's also a million photos *NOT* tagged with "grafitti", but nevertheless with grafitti in the motive or even *as* the motive.
Claiming that manual tagging is useless because it's incomplete and inconsistent is like claiming that Google-search is useless because it is based on page-content, meta-information and linking, all of which is incomplete and inconsistent. That fails to be the case.