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Flickr: A Tool for the Individual |
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To
gain a better understanding of how folksonomies work and in what
situations they are useful, it is helpful to look at different
implementations.
 Flickr
is designed
for people to post and share digital photos. This is
primarily a service for individuals, offering a place to post and a
system to organize so particular photos can be found again.
Consequently many of the tags that users apply are not
designed for
recall by the general public, but only for the people who posted them
or people who know them well. Terms such as "me" or "cute"
are fine
for the person who posted the photo, or for someone who wants to
randomly browse, but will do very little to help someone looking
specifically for an image of Jane Smith or a teddy bear hamster.
Flickr is an example of a narrow folksonomy,28 where one or few people tag something to find it later. There is only one tag per term used, and tags are directly related to the object. On Flickr, the primary tagger is usually the creator of the content. 
This type of tagging is especially helpful for
objects such as photos that are not easily searchable as they
contain
no text.29
For more information on narrow folksonomies, or a
detailed description of the
interactions in this image, you may wish to
refer to this
article
by Thomas Vander Wal.Flickr allows people to use tags in several ways. A search can encompass the entire database of tags, or can be restricted to a particular user's collection. Most practical use of Flickr involves the latter, such as a member searching for all photos of "dad" that he or she has posted. Browsing is also common though, as people search for other photos of interest to them. A recent clustering feature that attempts to group tags of related images is a step in addressing the problem of inexact language. Photographs can carry a great deal of personal meaning. Flickr encourages the natural desire to share photos by allowing members to add other users as contacts or to join thematic groups with photo pools. The popularity of these features reflects the attractiveness of the community aspect of folksonomies. *Click Image to Magnify |
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