lithium flowers bloom

Whereas social bookmarking websites are serving the purpose of personal stash of online assets for people, they are also performing extremely effective reorganization on the massive but scattered information on the web. Taking just image bookmarking tools/websites for instance, they are generating much more semantic metadata for all accessible images on the web, and are essentially “curating” more meaningful and better-quality image contents out of billions and billions.

Examining currently popular image bookmarking websites reveals the possibility of creating semantic image library on top of the whole image inventory of the internet. Here we’re not talking about image hosting services, although they also provide FOLKSONOMIC tools that help themselves evolve, but bookmarking services are clearly bringing in something more interesting.

Services specifically targeting visual images emerge due to the human nature of pursuing beauty. This fact does affect the categories of images being collected. We see most image bookmarking sites are really design/photography oriented even though it might not necessarily be their initial intention. Not a lot of people are bookmarking parties photos anyway, they have facebook already. It also shows that we do have different tools for collecting different aspects of information out of an image.

Besides those traditional folksonomic tools that most image hosting services are also providing, I think the most interesting features from these bookmarking sites are smart recommendation and the possibility to track cross posting (or reposting, or whatever).

Smart recommendation features algorithm that calculates image similarities. It could be tag based but in fact ffffound is implementing this just based on the image collection of a certain user and all users that find the same image favorable. It’s very similar to what Pandora and Last.fm is doing, I’m not very sure if there’s any image fingerprint stuff happening under the hood. Discussion?

Reposting tracking and duplication check are essentially technical tools that bookmarking sites come up with to release server burdens. However they could provide very interesting data on how images get referred to on the internet and could be an effective search helper.

FFFFOUND!

http://ffffound.com/

collect: bookmarklet, IE extension
redistribute: screensaver, iphone view
discover: no search, no tags, similarity comparing, smart recommendation based on personal taste, follow/follower system
misc: no way to find how many photos are logged, report inappropriate/copyright issue

VISUALIZE.US

http://vi.sualize.us/

collect: on-site url ref, bookmarklet, firefox extension

redistribute: unofficial facebook application, add-this style sharing
discover: social tagging, tag search, watchlist(fan system), does seem to be able to find similar images
misc: safe filter, duplication detection

74,446 bookmarks

WE HEART IT

http://weheartit.com/

collect: bookmarklet only
redistribute: ?
discover: social tagging, tag-only search, similar entries (tag based), contacts system
misc: unsafe filter

31795 * 20 = 635900 bookmarks

imgfave

http://imgfave.com/

collect: bookmarklet only
redistribute: facebook integration (sharing), friendfeed integration, blog sidebar widget
discover: no search, no tag, collection is a tag-like concept
misc: nudity alert on bookmarklet, related images seem irrelevant

tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/

collect: on-site, bookmarklet, facebook app, iphone app, api
redistribute: embed widget, api
discover: tagging, search, repost, follower system, trending page, realtime popularity radar(http://www.tumblr.com/popular)
misc: tracks reposting, multi media types (videos everything), no similarity match