Flickr And Self-Referential Folksonomy

I've been thinking a lot about Flickr and tagging recently, having just had to bash a load of tags onto my BarCamp pictures.

Lots of my mates are members, and when we've got together for socials, we share the pictures via Flickr afterwards. Many tag the images by subject, or use something like Upcoming's machine tags: upcoming:event=138806, which refer to the relevent event tag, and can be used by Upcoming's API to display photos from that event (held on Flickr), in the event page on Upcoming. "Old hat", some of you may say.

The other thing that regularly happens is that folks tag pictures with people's names or nicknames. Thus, you can see all the photos of me on Flickr (which have been appropriately tagged), whether they be in my photostream or someone else's. But here's where we get the problems.

Some people have particular tags by which they would like to be known, as well as their normal names. Ben (74 results currently) is a case in point, who also goes by the nickname of Kapowaz (56 results, some of them the same). Mark Norman Francis (390 pics) (aka Norm! - 2,324, not all of them him) thinks he's King Of The Britons (122). Adding all these tags by hand every time gets very tedious.

Now Flickr is very good at letting you organise your pictures, by set, date of upload, geographical position, etc. Their drag and drop interface is easy enough to get your head round with a bit of practice.

So I was thinking, why not let each Flickr user asign their own tags to describe themselves. Then give the Organiser Panel the facility to set which Flickr users appear in the photo, and that user's tags then get applied automatically. As long as you know that a person in one of your pictures is a Flickr member, you ought to be able to drag their icon onto a picture to set up the tagging, even if they are not in your friends, family or contact lists (these could easily load by default in the appropriate new "choose Flickr member" panel):

[mockup of the "choose member in photo" facility, via the Organiser panel]

Or when you come cross an individual picture in your Flickrstream, you can currently add it to a group via one of the fuction buttons at the top. Similarly, you could have:

[mockup of the "add member in photo" facility, in the Flickrstream view]

I'm sure that would save some donkey work on everyone's part, and would be quite interesting to follow the reference tag trails around Flickr until you get dizzy.

Comments anyone?

BarCamp Day 1 - Evening Sessions

Mark Norman Francis on Don't Be Scared of Code Reviews

Norm explained that the purpose of a code review is not to criticise other people's code. The findings are not escalated, there is no formal output - just for folks involved. Except Security problems, which are tracked in Bugzilla. So why bother?

• Verification - adhere to internal standards.
• Training - informal education of expectations of new hires
• Collective wisdom - [you will be assimilated!] Experts pass on their knowledge.

They are looking for, in HTML - valid, semantic, accessible.
CSS - valid (hacks separated out), modular (hung off ONE id - means you can reuse code on another part of site without relying on cascade), cross-browser (graded browser support)
Javascript - unobtrusive (pull it out into separate files, still get to the content with JS off), optimised, cross-browser.

Don't care too much about programmed page weight - ads multiply page weight hugely anyway. Page weight is not very relevent to each user but is to Yahoo!, since so many hits could mean server overload.

Perl/PHP must be documented (in the code, externally), understandable, standardised

[Olé Norm!]

How do they work? Time taken doing them is minimised. Quiet time is set aside beforehand for people doing the reviewing, away from email, IM etc.
During review, items are explained by reviewer, while the coder keeps quiet. A mooderator takes notes for them both, which are tabled for later. Then follow-up - the lead developer confirms that the problems identified have been rectified before code goes live.

Me on Taking Better Pictures
I'll post the main contents of my presentation in later posts, but it seemed to be fairly well received, with about a dozen folks coming to listen.

Andy Mitchell & James McCarthy on "Free Schmee"
Andy and James were talking about APIs and using them in a modular fashion - why invent the wheel again when you could reuse another API to do certain tasks, such as user verification. They freely admitted they'd been penning their presentation hastily when they'd rather have been attending mine. But never mind, it was still an interesting few minutes!

[James and Andy argue about who's going to work the slides...]

Next was dinner: geeks + pizza + beer = culinary carnage. At least there was no washing up!

[Colin Schlüter surveys the carnage]

I stayed chat with Andy Mitchell and John Wilson for quite a while after dinner, but made it to the main auditorium , back end of Ask Us Anything panel. Someone rashly asked to see the panel dance!

[Norm! shakes his booty, watched by Simon, Steve, James and Aral]

Of course, it wasn't long before someone asked "when can we play Werewolf!" So, most reconvened to the restaurant area and three groups started. Not sure how many games were played altogether, but I think it was at least nine, with various permutations of people flitting from one circle to anther.

[a wolf in gnome's clothing, perhaps? Tom Coates ponders who he's going to bite next; James Wheare (Wolf??) and Cristiano Betta don't seem worried by his proximity!]

And so to bed, perchance to sleep, at 4am... fat chance - wished the floor wasn't so hard. Got up again 4 hours later to find most still comatose:

[geek dorm, aka conference room]