The Ayman and Naaman Show

When in 2002 I started thinking about location information that’s embedded by your camera in photographs (aka “geotagging”), Ayman was still using a twin lens reflex camera (I don’t think he does anymore, he’s been working on getting up to date with consumer technology). Also back then, the location-based-camera (LbC) technology seemed to be a unknown-number-of-years-but-at-least-forever away from mass market.

Since then, photo geotagging was popularized by Flickr (and later Panoramio) at least among enthusiasts (led by chief mischief and enthusiast). Even more recently, new GPS-supporting devices are available to the masses like the Nokia N95 and the new iPhone (the iPhone can use cell towers or wifi signals for location as well). Unfortunately, the masses need to be aware of the availability of the location data and the applications that make use of it (like ZoneTag). The iPhone is promising but I am not sure it has a native geotagging camera application. From the far left side, Sony has been selling a GPS device that can by synchronized with your photos. But the LbC is still, effectively, mostly in the hands of enthusiasts.

Will EyeFi change the picture (ha!)? I don’t think so, despite what David Pogue has to say (”so clever, so revolutionary“). Yes, EyeFi has the technology to make any miniSD-card camera into a LbC. Yes, they are using Skyhook Wireless APIs to map from detected wifi signals to location information (hardly revolutionary by now, but certainly quite cool). So, yes, EyeFi promises to deliver limited-coverage geotagging for a wide range of consumer cameras. Great step forward, but not enough.

Two conditions are required to make this technology mainstream. First, the hardware needs to be cheap and built into the camera as a feature (or at least sold as part of a kit and fit inside the camera - the EyeFi card can certainly go that route).  More importantly, personal photo managnement software (e.g. Picasa, iPhoto, Windows Vista - brrrr) needs to natively support the location capabilities so that there are significant benefits for any single user (or family) in adopting it. Just having a location stamp on the photo will not be of interest to my mom. She does not upload to Flickr and does not care about maps. But if additional services are build around that location data - anything from automatic digital scrapbooking to additional information based on the photo’s or collection context - that could become more interesting. Andy Fitzhugh had shown some options for consumer photos with his Virgil, back in the days; I also suggested some personal photo collection benefits. Not only desktop apps - Flickr and Facebook, for example, could also create more interesting geotagging applications with better personal appeal.

Given the rumors in the past, and iPhoto’s adoption of the timestamp-based organization of photos, and the iPhone’s location capabilities, I predict that Apple will be the first out there to support location in a mass-market application (and the devices will follow). Sony, by the way, has an application now that works with their GPS device, but I don’t think it has more than basic map features. But it’s coming! 6 years from now we’ll all have LbCs. Except Ayman, maybe.

Brooklyn Museum and Flickr Commons: my good friend Naaman believes no significant contribution will be made in the museum’s effort to make a richer collection. Normally, I agree with him (but rarely in the matters of art) so we have sort of a double exception here.

The problem is, in fact, motivation. Cameron, Mor and danah categorized incentives for tagging back in 2006. Lets take a look at that list:

1. Future retrieval
2. Contribution and sharing
3. Attract Attention
4. Play and Competition
5. Self Presentation
6. Opinion Expression

Naaman accounts to the problem of anonymous tagging. For the Flickr Commons (and our friends in Brooklyn), the first three incentives are applicable if we assume the motivation for #3 is to attract attention to the photo and not the tagger. The last three are of a debatable contribution; I’m not really sure if people who want to express an opinion care to be identified.

This brings us back to motivation. While we can understand why people tag, we shouldn’t forget were they are tagging it. I would be interested in finding out what are the tag sets of the same image that’s posted to Flickr, the Wikipedia, and the ESP game. Each system has its own set of motivations and incentives. I believe we’d see radical changes. Lets look at a photo from the Commons for an example:

Currently Tagged with:Brooklyn Museum, egypt, lantern, Egyptian, archeology, buildings, Temples, Ramses the Great, Amun Ra, Aswan, Statues, hand tinted

How did ‘buildings’ get in there? Would it ever come up as an ESP tag? Nothing particularly canonical comes to mind aside from that tag is a classification of a greater set of structures in ancient Egypt (knowledge that this is part of a temple which is a building would help of course). How about other photos of Abu Simbel that have the tag building? A search shows there are none on Flickr right now.

So, Dr. Naaman, I do agree. We need to rethink how tagging systems work. Also, we should build new experiences for web museum goers and then (my dream has always been) show me stuff that I know or don’t know about when I visit the museum given my online activity around the museum’s collections. Real world interactions! Close your eyes - imagine it.

Meanwhile, I can’t even add a url as a tag (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Simbel) to link in some valuable metadata. However, I did add the tags Abu Simbel and was moved to the Brooklyn Museum’s
أبو سمبل photo.

Check out the top stories that I noticed on my “NPR Most Emailed” module on My Yahoo, today (third and fourth stories from top).

Turns out that people who email NPR stories have interest in email. Who would have guessed?! And what does it say about “most emailed” as a true measure of quality or interest?

A broader question: what’s the news story equivalent of “interestingness“? Is “most views/comments” better than “most emailed”? It’s definitely not “most Digged” [shivers]. This is one wisdom that I don’t think we have quite figured how to extract from the crowds in a few-to-many publishing system.

I have a hunch that In many-to-many systems like Flickr, Delicious and Slideshare, where (theoretically) the same people who create the content are also the viewers, there is a link from author/participation motivations to the participants’ actions on the site. Therefore, we get better measures of quality from activity. Why exactly is that the case? Maybe because there are many different avenues of feedback (comments, favs, views, links). Rashmi of Slideshare talked about this when she visited us at Y!RB long time ago. But despite Surowiecki, I don’t think we have a good general understanding yet of deriving quality from mass participation, only several successful attempts. Maybe personalization should be more rooted in these quality measures? Only Ayman knows.

I promised to write more about the Brooklyn Museum - that forthcoming post will certainly be related to this question…

The Brooklyn Museum, just a few miles from Naaman’s new residence, has gone all “social media” on us all of the sudden. Yay, museum! Dog bless! Ayman, can you send some of your magic blessings over to them? They’ll need them. Two different activities are in place, both of them present some issues of judgment regarding applications of social media.

First, the museum announced its participation in the Flickr commons project.

The project’s stated goals (from Flickr) are:

firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

One problem with that second part though: I, Naaman, predict that no significant contribution will be made.

This dog may remain lonely. Sample image from the collection (no rights reserved!)

Why not? It’s easy: the incentives and support mechanism for participation are lacking. For one, the usual set of motivations in tagging Flickr photos (summarized in our research paper - see the good old Y!RB blog) are driven by personal benefit and feedback. The various motivations combine being able to search my own photos and recall their context; getting public attention to my photos; and explaining my photos context/content to known others. None of these motivations exist when I tag other people’s photographs, and thus we have seen very little such activity - less than 1% of the tags last time we counted (pdf).

There are other reasons for contribution. In Wikipedia, the authors can follow the articles to which they contributed, and are recognized and identified for the edits they make. In Flickr, there is very little in ways of tracking your own or other people’s edits (your own comments, perhaps, in a limited way). The comments are at least identified as coming from the user who left them, but tags are not. This anonymous tagging presents a double problem: first, no accountability. There is no way for anyway to verify the correctness of each tag or the expertise of the person that added it (worse, only the owner of the photograph can delete a tag). Second, as there is no identification of the tagger, there is no “pride” or social capital in adding a tag, and very little personal benefit. One hope is that some users, like art scholars researching the collection for their own work, will find it useful to add comments and tags.

Incidentally, Wikipedia is thriving because of the significant set of user motivations it generates, summarized here. It is not clear that this set of motivations will exist on the Flickr Commons. Indeed, even the featured set of photos on the Brooklyn Museum’s page have seen little commenting and tagging activity to date.

What do to? Well, for example, either Flickr or the Brooklyn Museum could create a system that recognizes the contribution of users around the the Commons collection and provides feedback to the users. If I add a tag to a photo, I would be nice to know how many people found that photo as a result of my tag, and how many of those users found the picture helpful in some way. It would be great to be recognized as the person who added that tag, and perhaps on some page I can be recognized as the top contributor for photos of Paris, or for Decisive Moment photographs, or whatever.

In addition, to give other examples, adding personal mechanism that help me keep track on my activity on others’ photos would be great. Where are all the photos I tagged “Decisive Moment”? What’s the last image I added a tag to? What Commons images I commented on? These are tasks not easily performed in the current Flickr interface.

Still, simply making the images available is a brave step that even without further contribution will be super-super useful for art scholars, artists (like Ayman, at least that’s what he says), art enthusiasts, and others - even art-want-to-be-enthusiasts like Naaman. Only it can be even better, with the correct mechanisms built around the system.

OK, this is getting long. More about the other social media endeavor of the Brooklyn Museum and why does that make Naaman’s Mediterranean blood boil, next time.

p.s. Polar Rose, this all goes for you too.

[update: Forgot to mention that while I employed by Yahoo!, the text above does not represents the views and attitudes of my kind employer or anyone other than the author - not even Ayman's!]