Here’s an update on Flickr, which I’ve just joined. The user uploads their photos and then adds tags to them. These are basically keywords and that’s it. More at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/

The most popular tags in the past 24 hours and in the past week and the most popular tags of all time are all displayed. And there is ’see also’ and ‘related’. Now that is a neat use of metadata.

You need to join to see how this works when a photo is uploaded but the user can create their own tags, combine words and so on. It’s also possible to add tags to other people’s photos.

Democratic metadata - well if a huge user community is able to add its own keywords then the keywords which are used most frequently are going to become the de facto keywords for that content. This is creating metadata (in this case keywords) from the bottom up, not imposing from above.

While there is always going to be a subjective element to adding keywords, it will be interesting to see how the creation of metadata in this way develops.

And while I remember, even the term ‘tags’ is much better than ‘metadata element’.