The rise and rise of Flickr

If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at flickr. It's a photo website that is demonstrating just how wrong the nay-sayers were when they said that metadata-rich web websites would never take off because of the high cost of creating metadata. The existence of a ranking system, called "interestingness" encourages users to assign keywords to their images. Keywords are used to find the images and if images can't be found they can't be viewed and thus won't accumulate views or user comments. If accurate assigning of keywords leads to users not only finding images but finding images they like, this is encouraged by enabling users to add users whose photographs they like as contacts, at those be notified of new uploads. This again drives the accumulation views and user comments.

That's not to say that that there aren't many pictures on flickr with little or no metadata. Many photos are uploaded and never tagged, a significant number have no EXIF information having being cropped or editor in a photo editor such as Photoshop or GIMP.

There are also a great many photos on flickr which are best viewed as "personal mementos" --- inordinate numbers of pictures of cats (143707) and dogs (126093), weddings (390719) and parties (304141). One could hypothesise a world in which future cultural historians find a use for such a volume of loved animals and bacchanalian antics, but I don't see it personally.

Over four million of the images on flickr are available for use under one of the range of Creative Commons licences, so next time you've cautioning students not to lift copyright materials from websites for use in their work, why not recommend a site like flickr?