Google images labeler - the big picture
So the great folks at Google decided to use the combined 'wisdom' of the crowd in order to tag their images and to get that done ( because people would never really do it if there wasn't something in for them, too ), they licensed the concept of a game, invited in the people ( word of mouth, such a great thing ) and now they are harvesting their fruits of their work. The idea is that you go to the image labeler website whereas you are invited to 'play' against another, randomly selected person, whereas play is defined as an effort to pickup the best ( the ones you consider more relevant, that is ) tags for an image within a finite amount of time units. Same goes for your opponent. For every tag that you selected and your opponent has also selected, you earn points. And you go on and on selecting points, going up the score ladder and all that.
In effect, this gives Google so much valuable and mostly accurate information on all those images they have retrieved, in the form of tags. Because players need to really figure out the tags that most accurately would describe each image ( because the opponent will do the same thing ), those tags will 'always' reflect the real nature of the image. Google can pickup the best X tags per image ( from all unique tags selected for an image, pickup a subset containing the ones that occur more often, additionaly adusted based on which of those were selected first -- because the ones selected first are the more accurate ones ) [ This is just an idea btw ] and so when the user searches for something, those tags from this subset will also be used for selecting the ones to display in the results set. Also, they could train some sort of a system, by feeding it with those tags. Who knows?
All in all, cool stuff!
Sunday, 3 September 2006 0:54 am
Google / Apple etc
Its the small things at google that impress : Mr.Scoble visited the Google folks. He had a good time there.
We are 'all' waiting for the next scheduled Apple event, due on Sept.12th. Chances are its about the unveiling of the Apple iTunes MOVIE Store as well as the wide-screen iPod ( I hope its the one with the e-reader functionality ). Rumor has it that a new iMac 23" is also coming out really soon, even perhaps this month. Great news.
Friday, 1 September 2006 11:36 pm
Google BigTable paper is out
The wonderful ('mad')scientists/folks at Google released a paper on their BigTable system -- something I have been waiting for quite a long time. BigTable, for those who who don't know what it is "a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers." Sweet!
Friday, 1 September 2006 7:49 pm
