2011
For some time, I have been interested in the creative potential of tagging and I have finally decided to read what’s out there on that topic. Unfortunately,
most of the information I found was mainly focused on the practical and commercial use of tags, taxonomies, classification systems, improvement of
searchability, creating communities and understanding users’ behaviour.
That was before I came across Luis von Ahn’s idea of the ESP game and all its related ancestors. I am still not sure how to react to it really.
The concept of the human-based computation game is brilliant and surely in his presentation at Google TechTalks 06, he has a point when
he is talking about the huge amount of time some people waste by playing video games. However, I still find the scenarios that he proposes
through these games a bit creepy because they essentially encourage people to work for Google for free. What is even more surprising is
that the games could still be found online. It is a shame that inventions like this are rarely put into non-commercial use.
