Street smarts
| Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | --Sean |
Wow, I'm sorry for missing two alternating days, guys. If it helps, imagine that JR is still around, and that he forgot to post on those days. Man. What a slacker.
The concept of using large crowds of users to solve difficult problems has always interested me, especially because we have so many large crowds of users here at Yahoo!. With Flickr's new geotagging Corrections, we're putting that concept to work by allowing users to adjust neighborhood boundaries when they geotag photos -- if we say that a particular latitude/longitude maps to Chinatown in San Francisco and a guy taking a picture at that street corner is clearly out of sight of any delicious Chinese restaurants, then why shouldn't we allow him to let us know? Users have the proper motivation to contribute their knowledge back to the system, because they'll get more accurate tagging of their photos, and there are more than enough geotagged photos to let us get a really solid sample size going. It's really awesome to see such complicated, useful, and yet totally tangential information coming out of a "simple" photo sharing site.