photography and farming

April 2, 2008 by pmelcher.

A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done.

Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image:

After two days, the image was finally tagged with two words: “Pool” , “Man”. I guess that is what you get for free. Furthermore, when I downloaded the image, I could not find the keywords anymore…There is nothing automated about this service. It is currently impossible for a computer to recognize  the content of an image. The most advanced systems I have seen have a 10% success rate, and then again with very contrasted and simple pictures. Tagcow uses a little known service offered by Amazon call the Mechanical Turk. With this service, anyone can put a long, painful task and offer to pay for human beings to fulfill them

“Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it”. At 0.01 cent a picture, one can get images keyworded for cheap. However, the quality is not guaranteed.

Thus it is the power of the masses used here, making more obvious why they picked a cow for their name. Not the brightest animal in the land

Posted in No sense, Search, copyright, IPTC, keyword, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, filter | Print | 2 Comments »