Photobucket, a photo storage service owned by MySpace/News Corp, is introducing a new tagging feature. Flickr has been utilizing tagging for its pictures for quite some time now. Tagging means that a user inputs specific keywords that make searching for media easier.
Let’s say that I upload a picture of Taj Mahal… some appropriate tags to put for the picture would be “Agra” and “India.” This way when someone visits Photobucket, they can easily find your picture by searching for those terms.
How was Photobucket’s search-based before? Users could only find pictures based on their titles. Why did Alex Welch, founder of Photobucket hesitate to add the tag feature earlier? Tag integrity. Users have the power to lie about what their pictures actually are to attract more visitors. This problem is very commonplace in the tagging feature for videos uploaded to YouTube.
