As Flickr earns it’s award as the greatest social document of the 21st Century . We can’t help but wonder what else this very informal company can do to better its own accomplishments. Touting well in excess of three billion images, and a very simple and effective sorting system of tagging now known as folksonomy . This obvious solution drove Bradley Horowitz an MIT graduate devoted to developing an image recognition program to want to take it off the wall and rip it to shreds. Upset with himself for overlooking this simple solution.
Folksonomy as it is dubbed by Thomas Vander Wal is a collaborative taxonomy. Effective enough to get the nod from the ” Library Of Congress”, and “The Smithsonian” to contract Flickr staff to sort and index material for them. Flickr also like Face Book is plagued with myriad of species ( users). Some of whom are victims of their own individualism.
Like all communities this one is not absent of vanity and class warfare . There is an ever changing battle between professional photographers and the novices who make up the majority of Flickrdom. The putrid reaction to the unconventional style by novices to arrive at critically acceptable photographs . Is an insult to their years of schooling in their craft. Then again some more conventional companies whose model follows protocol probably feel the same about Flikr…..
