Tag! We Are It

The ability of flickr to create individual centric categorizing by free form tags is what really makes this tool the best in the box. While I can create by own organizational scheme, where bigger words mean more photos tageed with it, all kinds of interesting discovery happens when you being to look at what other people have tagged the same.

This flickr Explore link lets you see at a snapshot the ways te eniter flickr community is organizing photos. Not only do you discover new pictures this way, but then you might explore the person behind it, or see what other kinds of photos thet may have taken.

Each public tag set automatically generates a unique URL, a slide show link, and RSS feed. Then as you explore tag, you can wander down the paths of clusters. Follow along.

So what can you explore across commons tags?

let's say we are interested in travel, so we follow the roadtrip tag. We may find a light house, a abandoned boat (there is a story to be written there!), a tunnel, a glowing sky...

But then we look into photo cliusters, which bring together images with other tags people use along with the roadtrip tag.

There is a Mountain Cloud Tree structure for roadtrips with landscape photos, or a Califoria-Beach-Coast cluster, or a Arizona-Desert-Grand Canyon cliuster (hey, that is where some of mine might be!).

And there are tagged photos of everything imaginable (and not). How about the gorgeous camera toss photos? Compare or thik about the great variety of eyeballs. Follow the most recent photos related to Iraq or Darfur Take a journey to Antarctica. Find people interested in model trains, toy soliders, or teddy bears.

And on and on.

------------------------
return to cool flickr stuff
------------------------
This is but one piece of "I Didn't Know You Could Do That with Free Web Tools", a presentation for the 2006 K-12 Online Conference. Other pieces are scattered across the web!
Do you have any sense how dynamic and discovery-driven this is?