Mashup Guide

"Machine tags" (see Flickr: Discussing Machine tags in Flickr API) have been introduced into Flickr as generalization of things like geotagging. Machine tags are also known by many as "triple tags". These are tags with a specific syntax aimed primarily for "machine consumption" (that is, by programs) and not directly for display to the typical end-user. You can use machine values to store extra data elements for a given photo. I think that it's fair to say that most important example of such data has so far been the latitude and longitude associated with a photo. So important that Flickr ultimately introduced specialized functionality to handle this data, to take that data out of the realm of having people just shoehorning that info into tags.

I'd really like to know what uptake there has been on machine tags. I was hoping to be able to do searches for namespaces in use -- but as I document below, I don't know how to formulate a query to do so.

Some kinks have been fixed in the Flickr machine tags:

• If you look at http://tinyurl.com/2vyrgv -- you'll see that yws-flickr : Message: bug with searching for machine tags? has been fixed.

Some outstanding issues remain:

• missing negative values and decimals in the machine tag API. See yws-flickr : Message: Re: Machine Tag Bug - missing negative values and decimals?. When I do the a query for my pictures that use the geo: machine tag name space and ask for the machine tags, I get the "-" and "." stripped out. (I confirmed the problem on March 11 but as of April 19, I've no seen any resolution.)
• no response to yws-flickr : Message: Re: Ladies and gentlemen : Machine tags. I'd love to have a whole set of query functionality, including being able to look up all domains in use. I know about "geo" but what others are being used -- and with what frequency? For instance, we can pull up all the geo: machine tags by searching for "geo:" with the API call. See http://tinyurl.com/yt5k2f You will >500,000 photos under that domain. I tried variants on "geo:" to try to pull up all machine tags ("*:", "*", "*:*") but I couldn't find any that would get me all the machine tags....

What are the equivalent of machine tags in other systems? What to look at:

• bobdc.blog: All Your Google Base metadata taxonomy are belong to us and Google Base Help Center - What is an "attribute"? in Google Base.
• I also vaguely remember something about attributes in Amazon S3 that might be related to machine tags. (The connection is probably vague.)

In a sidebar to Chapter 3, I ask the question of whether we will be able to ultimately rely on visual searching instead of tags? I mention that that companies like Riya are hard at work to bring us visual search. What other companies are out there? Trying out Riya has been on my list for a while, especially because it has an API. If you have experience with Riya, especially the API, please contact me. I'd like to see whether I can do a mashup between Flickr and Riya in which I could feed Riya my photos, using the tags I already have in Flickr to train it to recognize faces of friends, and then ask Riya to tag the rest of my photos. I'm sure someone must have tried to do so already. How have they succeeded?

What might a non-word based search look like? Draw something that you want to look for and the search engine will bring up pictures that look like what you drew? Or would you present a photo to the search engine, and it would bring up similar photos? The fact that we still have to type words in to a search engine to search for pictures or video or music, shows how deep end and we are on words for search and for describing nonverbal objects. That's why tags are so central in Flickr, where the dominant form of data is visual.

Some nice blossoms in Berkeley....

(I'm demonstrating the blogging of multiple Flickr photos with Flock with this post)

I'm so used to using Flickr to host my pictures that I need to remind myself that the primary audience for my Flickr photos -- namely, my own family and close friends -- don't know about or care for Flickr the way I do. My sister, for instance, doesn't want to spend her time looking through tons of photos on the web; she wishes instead to be able to download a lot of my pictures into her collection.

That's where an application for downloading Flickr pictures would be useful. What does this have to do with mashups or information remixing? (BTW, I've not even explained what mashups are yet on this site!) Basically, the Flickr API (Flickr Services) that allows Flickr to be recombined with many other applications is what allows programmers to write downloaders for Flickr with relative ease. I've not had time to look through the list of downloaders but have found the following so far:

• GMAN: FlickrDown
• SourceForge.net: Flickr Explorer
• Flickr AutoDownloadr