Are you looking for new ways to interact with content from the web, such as photographs from Flickr?
In a world where more and more people are self-publishing content online, there is growing interest in finding new ways to consume or interact with this incredible wealth of artistic and creative material. New iPhone apps designed as “viewers” for such content are appearing at an incredible rate. Wonderful, right? Of course! However, we are a long way from realizing the true potential of this phenomenal repository of content. In fact, a large problem associated with such huge collections of resources is exactly how to go about finding and navigating the content.
Traditional approaches, such as searching by tag, are fine if you are looking for something specific and you are willing to accept that if the content isn’t tagged with the same words you use for your search (synonyms are not enough), you will never find it. One potential route for improvement is to develop search algorithms to understand the tags and then do a semantic search across the content (good for text searches). This helps a little with non-text content, such as images, video and music, but still relies on the content being tagged by a human.
A better approach for these types of resources would be to introduce automated recognition algorithms so that a computer can reliably tag the content. Some of these algorithms are approaching usefulness, such as object recognition in photographs. Facebook is even using face recognition to automatically tag photographs of its users these days. However, this is by no means the full solution to automatic tagging. We are a very long way from getting a computer to automatically detect and tag a location of a photograph, for example (although some cameras can tag the location at the time the photograph is taken thanks to GPS technology).
Advances in search technology are an important part of content discovery, but cannot address two fundamental issues. The first can be described by, to coin a phrase, searcher’s block. Similar to writer’s block, a phenomenon created by the human conscious whereby creative thinking is inhibited and the sufferer cannot conceive fresh ideas of what to write, or in the case of searcher’s block, what to search for. This limits the breadth of interesting or relevant content able to be discovered simply by not thinking to search for it.
The second issue is that the search space is limited to topics, subjects, concepts and ideas that are already known to the searcher. How can one search for a new genre of music when it hasn’t even got a name yet? Certainly not by tags.
Social media is having a huge impact on new content discovery. From Twitter to Facebook to turntable.fm (one of my current favorites), the idea of being able to receive recommendations from people who have similar tastes and interests to you is a very powerful one, and helps new concepts and content spread quickly.
Also, by opening up content to developers through the use of interfaces known as APIs (Application Programmers Interface), new possibilities are introduced for content discovery. For example, Flickr publishes, via APIs, lists of photos determined to be ‘interesting’. Although Flickr does not publish exactly how it determines a picture to be interesting, it does tell us that the social effect is central. It looks at how many times a picture is viewed, shared, commented on, liked, etc by its millions of users, essentially ‘crowdsourcing’ an opinion on how interesting a photograph is deemed to be.
This is an interesting idea, and one which inspired the creation of the Scatterpic iPhone app. Scatterpic integrates with Flickr to present its players with an endless supply of genuinely interesting images with which to play games. With future releases, we plan to augment this functionality by presenting players with even more relevant content based on personal preference.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the Scatterpic iPhone app Flickr integration. We trust you will discover many beautiful, breathtaking, and thought-provoking images selected by the world’s biggest collection of photography critics – Flickr users themselves.
Would you like to suggest new ways for Scatterpic to present you with content? We’d love to hear from you! Please use the comment feature below or contact us via our forum.
