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A new web 2.0 service dubbed Tagcow has sprung out of nowhere a couple of days ago. Tagcow, so far has managed to create quite a stir and although Tagcow maybe a cool and useful application, some are questioning the new service, emphasizing on the accuracy of tagging, its usefulness and the never ending question on privacy statements.

In brief, Tagcow is a photo tagging service that automatically assigns descriptive tags to photos that users upload into Tagcow. The service identifies the objects in a given photo, and then assigns generic descriptive tags based on photos subject.

At first glance, it would seem a great tool, a work of magic even. For how can an automated system identify the objects in a given photo to come up with identifier tags for those objects? Some questions that came out were who does the tagging, human or some automatic algorithms? And based on the current flow of tag request that come into Tagcow, it would seem that humans maybe tagging the photos after all. The influx of request caused the site to disable the tagging feature for the moment. The human taggers probably could not cope up with the influx of request. 

But whether Tagcow used automatic taggers or human taggers is not the point of all this, but on the accuracy of tagging photos. From the owner’s point of view, would they rely on others to tag your photos their photos? Isn’t it more useful and efficient if photo owners are the one who’s going to assign descriptive tags into their photos?

Despite of these questions, Tagcow in itself is a pretty cool and useful service. Some minor tweaking on its TOS and privacy statements must be done first.  Plus a more detailed explanation of how Tagcow “really” works would be a welcome addition in understanding the service clearly.

Read [Tagcow] Via [Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection] Via [TechCrunch]

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