Filtered Judgment

The first step necessary to set up our Flickr account was to obtain a Yahoo ID, because Flickr is interwoven with Yahoo’s already established login system. As Team Wintermute, we took this opportunity to create a team email address at istwintermute@yahoo.com. This has proved a little more reliable than the email system through Angel, which has a history of losing emails that are quintessentially important. A few of us had Yahoo accounts already, but this simplified the whole process to a universal login we would all remember. A definite benefit to Flickr’s login system is this connection with Yahoo. Yahoo’s support with its massive user base allows Yahoo users to have near instant access to Flickr’s services.

The next step in setting up a gallery was actually taking pictures that we believed visually spoke the message of the IST department. The IST building seemed to be the shining monument to our philosophy on technology. It was all too fitting that the building where we spend most of our time would be main subject of the pictures. So we set out with our camera and took photos from different angles trying to catch the IST building in “a different light”. For instance, the picture “Sunset on IST” uses light in a positive way, combined with the title and caption to illustrate a mood or a feeling in a way one couldn’t do verbally. Comparatively, “John Stuart Mill, on Liberty (1859)” does with words what a visual cannot. It verbalizes quite elegantly that there is more to technology then just the system itself; it grows through people.

Uploading photos to Flickr is a very easy process. Just as a camera is point and click, uploading photos to Flickr is browse and click. It took five minutes to get all of our photos onto our Flickr account. Once they were there, the real work began.

It is a lot harder to tag, name, and describe so many photos about the same thing. It was a design flaw in our method of getting pictures, in a way. We had to ask ourselves what was unique about each photo when compared to the others. We were successful, but it was taxing. We should have taken the time to come up with a few different picture ideas before we started taking photos, so we would have a wealth of different subjects.

We often chose to focus on the mood and aspects of the building that were prevalent in the photo when describing it and titling it, because that is what made them unique. We learned as lot about how to tag from looking at how other users tagged similar pictures of our very own IST building. The user “Opacity” has had photos from August of 2007. He tagged every photo first with Penn State, psu, and then IST, and with just cause. There is a strong German user base on Flickr and “ist” is a derivation of the verb “to be” in German. This causes a problem.

A major flaw in the search engine of Flickr lies in that it is not case sensitive, and sometimes words that are similarly written mean different things in different languages. IST is the same in the search engine as typing ist, which in some cases might put photos with tags just slightly different in the search results (ei. Photos tagged Penn State or penn state). But across different languages, this strategy causes mayhem! How many times do you need the word “is” in description? Flickr needs to differentiate between different languages, possibly by having a language selection tool in the search options. This would eliminate the search results that are obviously not pertinent. That said, the tagging structure, when carefully used, can be a springboard for finding people that share your interests. All you had to do to upload multiple tags was separate each one with a space and put two-word tags in quotes. After that, every time you click the tag it searches for other photos from any user that were tagged the same way and places them in front of you.

The flaws in the tagging system are inherited from the natural flaws of folksonomies. Synonyms are difficult to link. Especially in a multilingual system, it becomes difficult to link photos to search terms. All in all, Team Wintermute’s assessment of Flickr is positive, but not shining. We think the tagging system is practical and well implemented, but not perfect by any means.

• Martha and Paul collaborated on the paper
• Eric and Matt took the pics
• Martha and Matt titled and tagged most of the pics
• Paul set up the Flickr account and the yahoo mail istwintermute@yahoo.com