Metadata adds value: Photos plus metadata equals money.

Sharing photos, via websites, amongst family and friends is nothing unusual and now some websites are offering to market your photos to publishers and other markets enabling you to make money. Metadata produce the value-add and transform a picture of your holiday that you might otherwise only share with family and friends into product that a publisher will buy. fotoLibra is a good example of such a site and has been getting some attention in the business press and was featured in February’s Real Business magazine’s “50 to watch 2005”. fotoLibra, With their business model in mind, devote a lot of effort on advice on how to create metadata even (in the their forum) going into some detail about Dublin Core.

“Established [picture] libraries are now busy cataloguing and digitising their huge collections, and searching can be a nightmare. That's where fotoLibra has a great advantage. The people cataloguing its images are the ones who know them best—the photographers and picture owners themselves. That means picture buyers can find exactly what they're looking for, quickly and reliably.“

So here is value from Metadata being created at source. There is however an interesting forum debate about the resulting problems of “keywording”. People often overdo the metadata and “throw the dictionary or thesaurus at it” I also found it interesting that they are using DOIs.

Flickr from Ludicorp research is another photo sharing site that is getting a lot of attention and was featured in the Guardian recently. It is interesting that you can choose to license the photos you upload to Flickr under a Creative Commons license. They too place a lot of emphasis on metadata or “tags” Both these sites, because they are about sharing are good examples of Folksonomy in action. I noticed Ludicorp’s president Stewart Butterfield is sharing a platform to speak on “Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess” at next month’s emerging technology conference in San Diego.