Do tags work? By Cathy Marshall
An entertaining study of photo tags on Flickr reveals user tags to be somewhat, um, lacking... In a study of photos of a mosaic of a bull in Milan, one that has a good luck ritual associated with it, Marshall found taggers tagging photos with retrievability-hampered results. In other words, the average joe isn't very good at tagging, even for their own data.
The message
here is almost painful: a great proportion of user
tags add little or no further information; as such,
they don't appear as often in narratives or titles.
Personal names, which may be quite useful for finding
photos among one's own collection (especially over
the long haul) are less well represented in all types
of metadata, but are relatively similar in quantity.
Now here's a property of tags that I find almost
comical: they are seldom verbs, even if a verb is
just the thing to characterize a photo. What's unique
about what tourists do when they visit the Galleria's
bull mosaic? They spin. In fact, if you type in Milan
spin as your Flickr search terms, you pull up 94
results, 70 of which are pictures of our bull mosaic.
20 out of 24 results on the first page are on target.
Although spin and spinning make the top 20 list of
tags, they are by no means commonly used terms; they
are used less than 1% of the time (0.7%). That's just
7 tags. On the other hand, spin makes up 4.8% and
9.5% of title and narrative terms. People just don't
seem to be thinking of tags as verbs.