Is Tagcow The Future of Tagging on Flickr?

Ok, now I have no idea exactly how this works and I'm still trying to figure it out, but this could be something very, very cool.

On Thursday I got an email from a company called Tagcow. Tagcow claims that they can automatically tag thousands of photos for you. They are using the Flickr API and are set up so that you can either upload photos to their own site or link your Flickr account up to their site where both descriptive and people tags can be added to your photos.

Tagcow has some demo videos on their service here.

I tested the site out yesterday using my avatar and uploaded the photo to their site. The photo was tagged with man, Canon, camera and mirror. Very accurate descriptive tags of the photo.

So I decided to take the Flickr plunge yesterday and linked my flickrstream up to their site via the Flickr API authentication and have started to see tags coming back on my flickr photos.

Take this photo. I tagged this photo myself with the following tags: How Berkeley Can You Be Parade, How Berkeley Can You Be Parade 2007, How Berkeley Can You Be 2007, parade, car, art car, art, and Disney.

Tagcow added four additional tags to the photo above: figure, witch, wicked, and toy.

Ok, those are *excellent* additional tags to add to that photo.

Now I have no idea if Tagcow is using some sort of Riya-like photo recognition software or if they simply have a bunch of people manually tagging away my Flickr photos in the background, but either way this seems really, really cool.

I'm not sure on the economics or business model of Tagcow but the application for a site like this in terms of image search seems pretty huge.

I'll blog more on Tagcow after I understand a little more about how their technology works. This definitely may be a company worth watching.