I like to use Creative Commons pics from Flickr to pretty up my blogs but I’m finding it increasingly hard to find good pics through key word searches. It’s petty good, but lots of people are adding lots and lots of tags which reduces the strength.
It’s the fine line of trusting your community and rewarding good tagging and having some people abuse it to lift their traffic. This post says that Flickr and Delicious don’t reward it too much but I’m not sure that’s true. It might be subtle but adding lots of superlatives “wonderful awesome sexy lovely nice funny” tags can give you incrementally more traffic. And when you can bulk tag, e.g. using the uploading programs, it is really easy to do.
It’s also interesting to think about Plasq who add a Plasq and Skitch link to every image you upload to Flickr using their app. Great promotion for them, but if they are successful (as I’m sure they will be) I wonder what impact it will have. Firstly you’ll never find pictures of the actual app (unless you add ’screenshot’ I guess) nor of Cris and Brian (no great loss ;-) ) This is not exactly tag spam, but it’s mass link association which has the same search effect.
End verdict. Add tagging (of course) but make it easy to do but hard to game. Welcome to the challenge.
It’s the mysterious and uncontrolled beauty and beast of tagging.
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