Graphic Design, Imaging and Publishing

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.