Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.
2 Responses to How to Share a Taxonomy with Other Photoshop Album Users?
Stewart Butterfield
May 25th, 2004 at 12:42 am
Flickr actually has tags as well, which operate in a delicious/album sort of way. You can see the 150 most popular tags at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags
The UI is not as nice as Album, but it will be comparable (nice and easy) in the next release and perhaps cooler by v1.0. I actually installed Album a few weeks ago (finally) and it is really well done. But it’s not online, which is a little insane (of course, our plan is to remedy that
The thing I really like about tagging is that there is no controlled vocabulary. The way it is, you get perhaps 80% of the value of a more traditional ontology-driven approach, but it at least 10x simpler — and that is a very good trade off.
Olivier Travers
May 25th, 2004 at 10:01 am
Stewart, in the context of Flickr it makes total sense to let people use adhoc tags. If your users somehow converge on a loosely normalized set of tags as seems to be the case, so much the better, but it’s not core to your value. On the other hand the online application I’m considering building is dedicated to a specific domain of interest. Those last 20% is where the added value will happen in my case, and the kind of users I’ll be going after should hopefully be able to cope with it. For my project the ontology is the web site.
There might be an intersection between such a topical, structured space and a looser, social space such as Flickr and I’m watching your services to think of opportunities to connect. I believe the same picture has the potential to live in several places for different purposes (e.g. a nice mugshot could go in Flickr, a blog, HotOrNot to support sharing, story telling, aggregated rating). More later once I’ve secured the resources to create a pilot site.