Cherry Blossoms and some musing about flickr and Metcalfe's Law

Photo by alphanumeric (via DCist).

I am quite astounded by the power of Flickr but there are some issues. When the multimedia Internet first became operational, people likened it to a library with all the books tossed on the floor--in other words no way to make sense of it or to find things.

Then came search tools. Altavista was one of the first. These days tools like Google and Yahoo have transformed our ability to find useful information from all over the world. (Check out scholar.google.com as but one example.)

At first I was concerned that without the equivalent of poking through a card catalog, one loses the opportunity to find great information seemingly serendipitously, but a result from the organization and cross-indexing and categorizing of each entry. But using search a little less refined, less specific, or being willing to trawl through at least 10 pages of listings means I find a lot of great things seemingly by happenstance. (Having access to the Library of Congress opens even more floodgates of information, particularly their journal article databases.)

But this works because of keyword specificity.

If people use tags on flickr in a slovenly way, or not at all, the power and value of the network is vastly reduced.

I want to use powerful tags like "neon" "sign" "storefront" "market" "transit" etc. to find images related to the work that I do in historic preservation, urban revitalization, and related activities. But if someone tags their dozens of graffiti images "market" it makes it that much harder for me to find "public markets" images like this one.

Pike Place Market in Seattle, photo by purincess'.

Right now, there could be an incredibly interesting photo "folksonomie" developed over "cherry blossoms" in the U.S. and Japan and other parts of Asia, comparable to the "happenstance" that so many people uploaded photos about "The Gates" and actually tagged them as "The Gates."

The Gates tag has close to 8,000 photos, and the Cherry Blossoms tag has 600+. I wonder how many more photos there are of "The Gates" tagged as "market" "grafitti" etc.

From Japan. By nseki.

Not from Japan. Photo by mminnich.

Find these photos and more at cherry blossoms. See this previous blog entry on Metcalfe's Law and Transit (via the new Google search function. I do love Google.)

I highly recommend that you view some of these groups of images as a slide show. (And yes, I do love flickr too.)