By now everyone and their mom has heard of Flickr, that handy photo sharing website that is so awesome.
Well I had this little idea for a cool new feature they could add:
Right now they have a handy ‘tag’ system that works like keywords. This is cool when you want to see all the photos that are of ‘cats,’ but what if I wanted to see pictures of current events? When Brandon started up photoblogs.org, he had the top 100 photoblogs listed there, and that’s cool and all, but it starts to suck when time goes on, and the list is always roughly the same. So I said “Hey, you should put a ‘recent popular sites’ on there.” So he added this nifty little section called Top newcomers and it works like this:
These are the top 10 registered photoblogs that have been added to Photoblogs.org within the last 4 months. Rankings are derived from the favorites lists of our users. In case of a tie, older sites are ranked higher.
Flickr could benifit from something similar to this: limit the time to one week or maybe even just a few days, and then list which tags are the most popular for that time period. The information may already be there if they store a timestamp with when a photo was tagged, but even if they don’t, it might be pretty easy to add in.
The reason I started thinking about this was on my way home from the coffee shop tonight I saw some people staring up at the moon. Now I consider my self a pretty connected person, and take breaks from work all day to read the goings on in the world and a bunch of blogs too, but for some reason I didn’t hear one peep about this lunar eclipse that happened.
Anyway, imagine that you just read something in the paper about a big protest, or about some huge natural disaster, or a lunar eclipse… and you go to Flickr and look at the recent ‘hot tags’ and get to see tons of images all of the things going on in the world right now (or last week as it may be). Or maybe, you completely miss a lunar eclipse because nobody tells you about it, but you still get to see all the pictures people took because you visit the Flickr ‘hot tags’ page every morning.
Did you see this? http://flickr.com/photos/tags/eclipse/
yep, I filed my pics under ‘lunareclipse‘ though, since the eclipse tag had older pics including a couple shots of Mitsubishi Eclipses.
I’m actually thinking about building a little Flash thing that uses the Flickr API to do what I was talking about… not sure if it will work yet though since I doubt that they put timestamps on their tags.
Maybe this is “temporal ethnoclassification”? Basically, you’re applying a time variable to ethnoclassification.
You still have the problem of the vocabulary being incorrect or incomplete, but that might be solved by finding a middle ground.
Yeah I actually came across exactly that today when I was looking at ‘haloween‘ pictures.
I think they could fix that easily by simply giving Google style ‘did you reall mean xxxx?’ type hints.