Google Image Labeler, a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.

Google Image Labeler is Google’s attempt at crowdsourcing image tagging. Why have people do it? because computer vision is poor.

Google gets big benefit out of this: they get correctly tagged images, thanks to the double-team, you-both-must-agree-on-tags approach; they can then pop those tags directly into their image search results. What do the users get? Points. Prizes? No. Points? Yes.

This is less a fascinating study in Google harnessing people to do work than it is in the power of people to build a thriving community around something they enjoy. People are donating their time because they enjoy doing it: the only incentive is a little recognition and a small amount of human interaction. But sometimes, a little recognition is more than enough to pull users in: we’re all motivated strongly by the desire to get our name in the headlines. Often enough, this is what a website needs to build a thriving community: it needs a hobby with a scoreboard.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 5:52 pm and is filed under yak. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.