More Flickr goodness...
The Library of Congress has released over 3,000 photos from its archives. And by "released," I mean "posted on Flickr." How awesome is that?! I predict many hours of browsing through them and marking lots of favorites.
This is a pilot program, and more images will be released soon, no doubt. (The LOC has over 14 million!) The purpose? Free labor, of course. They want Flickr users to tag the images with descriptive words, and in some cases even provide information about the photos ("Hey, that's my grandpa!") Truly a 21st century project. I love the interwebs!
Of course, there are lots of cynics who say the quality of the information will suffer due to it being supplied by any average Joe. But I think they will work out the kinks. Right now, I believe you can tag any image with any word or phrase you want. They'll have to come up with a new "voting" system whereby if a tag gets a certain number of votes, it's "verified," or something along those lines.
Things like this CAN work. Case in point: Wikipedia. Yes, it has its own issues, but the positives FAR outweigh the negatives.
And for me, a cultural history geek, this is like iTunes giving away 3,000 songs!
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