Today on the geowanking list Sonny Parafina wrote:
“Raj put forward his planning use case that required lines and polygons. Could someone articulate a use case for “intermediate stages”? I think that would be a useful place start in addition to all the discussion. I’m still not sure we are all talking about the same problem set.” [emphasis mine]
The following was my response.
My wife Rachel was in the ad business for a long time, and has hammered into me the following mantra – start with a goal, then develop strategies to reach that goal, and finally devise some tactics to implement the strategies. She laughs at me (and most of my fellow geeks) because I’m (we’re) always doing things from the bottom up – “hey here’s a cool idea, I wonder if I toss it into the ether it will become a solution to someone’s problem that I’m not sure exists yet?” Take RDF for instance… (just kidding guys, no flames please).
All I can do is try to answer those three questions from my perspective:
My Goal: Make photos more searchable.
My Strategies:
Make it possible for search engines to know what a photo is about, rather than having to guess what it’s about from the surrounding context.
Build on existing solutions, rather than starting from scratch.
Make it dead-easy for everyone to update their web pages.
My Tactics:
Build a photo app that makes it really easy to get photos up onto the web (i.e. Web Photos Pro).
Enhance the alt tag on the web pages produced by my app. Exactly what form that might take is up in the air, but there are at least three possibilities, as discussed 2/3rds of the way down at 3. Making Photos More Searchable, and again at Four XHTML Questions.
Output RSS from the app so that people can subscribe to my photos with an RSS-reader (if they are so inclined), and the feeds can be indexed by Technorati, etc.
Build on the success of RSS by suggesting something similar that’s photo-specific. I’ve called that PhotoRSS, and discuss it at PhotoRSS.com. Personally I’m hoping that someday someone will build a “Photorati” search engine that indexes PhotoRSS feeds just like Technorati indexes RSS feeds.
FWIW, I believe there’s one tactic missing, that I just haven’t had time to get started, and that’s to develop a geourl-like service for photos. GeoURL got millions (?) of people to add latitude and longitude to their web pages. Who had any idea that there was so much pent up demand? I think there’s similar pent up demand for photos, but there needs to be a “geophoto” or similar service to kick start it, and it needs to be such a simple html mod that anyone can do it without having to look at the spec every time. If I had time I’d turn www.photorss.org into such a site.
