It would explain why “cud”, “grass”, and “udder” are the most common keywords.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/earlysound/2374487968/

Tagcow is still not address the point in time where tagging needs to occur, let me explain.

As a big RDF/machine tag nerd I will not go into some long tirade about marking up all data, not just photos. But I will say we, as regular end users, are not being supplied the proper tools at the correct point in time. Being confronted with “Please tag this photo” while uploading is way too late, I believe the answer is applying context earlier ( thing EyeFi card ) and in small increments all culminating in a summary of tags that can be reviewed at the end of the process ( uploading to Flickr ). Machines could also cross reference activity streams ( FreindFeed, Facebook, etc. ) to create tags for people, places and things.

…but alas my nerdy dream of a semantic, properly marked up world only exists on Tantek’s wiki pages and nowhere else. Sigh.

For tagging and organizing loads of photos at once try Photonic. Beautiful little app. I’ve been using it for a month now and love it. i wrote a wee bit on it here.

The service works two ways right now.

Either *you choose* to upload certain photos to their site or you give them access to your Flickrstream via the Flickr API.

Since 100% of my photos in my Flickrstream are already public photos I wasn’t worried about the privacy thing. Anyone can see 100% my Flickr photos anyways.

I will say that they did a very good job tagging my 11,000+ photos on Flickr. Many of the tags were conceptual in nature and I don’t believe AI could figure them out. Tagging a photo of a witch as “wicked” for instance. I don’t believe that a machine is capable of that level of abstraction.

I do believe that at least in part they have humans tagging the photos — but if it’s free to me what difference should it make if they are using AI or human beings. Either way the net result is that my photos on Flickr are better tagged and organized with no cost or work to me. This should also improve traffic to my photos through search both on Flickr as well as on Yahoo by extension.

I’m not sure that the “no cost to me part” is a sustainable business model, nor am I sure that this can scale. Someone somewhere has to pay the humans to do this work right? I’m not sure how advertising could generate enough income to pay for the work and I’m not sure many people would really be up for paying for a service like this. But at least for the time being it was nice to have someone do all this work on my public Flickr photos.

Sounds like I’ll ’steer’ clear of this one for now.

I’m going to go kill myself.

Yeah, if they tag photos in my iPhoto library, then there’s definitely a privacy concern.

I took a gander at their site again, it looks like they’re focused on manual upload and Flickr: http://tagcow.com/how_does_it_work

Whew.

Thinking about the privacy issue. If your photos is already public on Flickr, what does it matter if some guys in an office help tag it? Once something is public on the internet, it’s public.

Hmmm. Interesting.

I get a kick out of how they say “Legal stuff TBD.” … not even “Terms of Use TBD.”