Torley Lives

I was musing today about the Amazon Mechanical Turk, which makes use of humans for cheap labor to accomplish tasks that are hard or unable for computers to (presently) do. I was browsing the offers on a whim to see if there was anything I'd want to sign up for, and the brief answer is no.

But, a few mouseclicks later, it got me to thinking: I have an awful lot of Flickr photos that could use better tags. Image recognition is still in its comparative infancy, and Flickr can't tell automatically, say, that this is a hedgehog:

And not only that — it's sleek, shiny, green and pink, and appears to be standing on some rocks in a fuzzy pink seabed. You'll note the current tags are: secondlife, torley, slbuzz, color, crazy, wetheral. Using the great SLBuzz crossposting service from Second Life-to-Flickr, "slbuzz" always gets inserted. I chose "secondlife" and "torley" to always be included, "color" and "crazy" are from the original postcard's title, (tags get made out of pretty much every word in the comments too), and "wetheral" is the region name.

There's so much more that could be done to make this image searchable! Beyond tags, Flickr notes (rectangular areas with captions) could be added to identify specific points of interest, and while they aren't seen much on my photostream, I'd welcome them.

We live in an era where digital prints are a few cents (in US currency) apiece. Frequently, the first few dozen are free. So relatedly, think about this: how much would you pay someone to tag your Flickr stream? Precisely, to manually contribute words describing the actual content (people, places, things) and also some subjective descriptors like emotions aroused ("sadness"). And has anyone earned money for such a chore, yet? I did some casual searches and couldn't find any matches on Mechanical Turk or elsewhere.

I'd expect this has already been done. In any case, not well-known. For the longest time, I've set permissions so any Flickr user can add tags to my pics as they see fit; I've only observed it done infrequently (and wish I could generate some stats of that to show you, but there doesn't appear to be an easy way).

It doesn't have to be about money either: I don't discount the possibility of communal tagging sessions, where users arrange to tag a set, collection, whatever of each other's photos and make such visual information more retrievable. As exciting as visual search is, we still describe what's in them in words — text — and imagine what gems in the annals of Flickr and other photosharing sites might be deliberately found (in addition to "stumbled across") and enjoyed?

I also feel strongly about this because sometimes after uploading pictures, I feel like I'm not the best one to describe 'em. I sometimes think,

"Are these the right choices?"

then a stream of consciousness flurries forth upon the keyboards, Enter is dutifully pressed, and soon enough, the uploads are done. I tell myself that if I want, I can add tags later, but I hardly ever do unless I come across a long-lost snapshot I'll need to retrieve time and time again… like my watermelon logos (note the comprehensive tagging on that, but it could still use more):

Thus, I invite your thoughts; and in the meantime, I invite you to tag these:

in return, if you're on Flickr and allow for it, I'll tag some of yours.

Let's call it a little experiment.