The new news
by Giles Turnbull
When I heard about the Buncefield explosion on Sunday, the first thing I did when I got to the computer was check BBC news.
But the second thing I did was look for photos tagged with Buncefield at Flickr; and the third thing I did was look for links tagged with Buncefield at del.icio.us.
These two sites have become a perfect news filter, although neither of them try to be. Whenever some major event takes place, you can be sure that photos of it will be on Flickr in no time at all – and that with sensible use of tags, you’ll be able to find them.
It only struck me later on that my efforts to find images of the disaster on Flickr were entirely automatic; I didn’t stop to think about where to look next, it was done without hesitation. My mind now associates poking around inside Flickr’s tags with the act of finding out about news.
A digression: now that del.icio.us has been bought by Yahoo!, and Flickr is already owned by Yahoo!, might we see Flickr’s “interestingness” technology being copied over to the del.icio.us links database?
