I was going to post last week, about the farce that is Formula One, but after re-reading my bile-filled rant, I thought it was best to put that aside and let the rest of the world say it. I really have little more to add on the subject.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have joined Flickr since having my new camera and I am having a lot of fun with it, much to the exasperation of my wife. However, looking at my statistics page, only one of the photos taken with my new camera make it into my top 10 views of all time.

The most popular image is this:

taken at Goodwood in 2005, it shows Damon Hill driving one of the cars his father’s team built before his tragic death in 1975 in the air crash that not only killed him, but the man who was to drive this car in the 1976 Formula One World Championship.

In many ways, the photo is very poignant, which is possibly why it has so many hits. It is also a rare picture, as to my knowledge Damon Hill has never driven the car before, or since.

The second most popular photo is this:

Personally, I find this to be a more intriguing shot – ephasising the poverty in which this community live. But what is slightly concerning is the search term that was entered into Google Images that led someone to this image: ‘Latino Prostitutes’. I know we live in a sick world, and there are some very sick people out there, but nowhere in my image, description or tags have I mentioned those two search terms.

I’ll grant that Google has been ‘intelligent’ to work out that the Dominican Republic could be classed as Latin America (although I would class it as Carribean), however – where did ‘prostitute’ come from?

Perhaps I should consider changing the title of the image, but again ‘Little Girl’ does not evoke anything sexual to me – am I a little naiive?

Of course, given the fact that I have now mentioned this in a blog post, it is now going to be indexed by Google and the chances are that the image will be even more associated with the search terms.

Can we trust machines to truly understand the subtle semantics of text? I wouldn’t expect them to understand sarcasm or irony, but could Google one day ‘understand’ the semantics of this post and reduce the association of the image with the search terms if a blog post or article is describing what an image is not?

Then there is the added complications of a post like this, where I am reinforcing the association of one image – Damon Hill, Graham Hill, the GH2 and to a lesser extent Tony Brise, but I am also reducing the association between the ‘world’s oldest profession’ and the image of the girl.

Flickr and other such sites allow you to ‘tag’ your images to reinforce themes, but as far as I am aware, they do not yet provide this facility.

Flickr does provide the following advice if you are concerned about the sites/search terms that you see in your stats:

Search engines
If your photos turn up in a search for terms you’d rather not be associated with, you need to remove those terms from the content in your account, like photo titles and descriptions, tags, your screen name, or your Flickr profile page. If you decide that you’d prefer not to be part of search results on other services, you can set a preference on Flickr to prevent external searches from adding your Flickr account to their index. Search engines do not update their (huge) indexes in real-time, so if you decide to change that setting on your Flickr account, search engine indexes can take a few weeks (or sometimes more) to reflect your preference. 

This is all well and good – but the title is ‘Little Girl’, the description is ‘Dominican girl outside of school’ and the tags are ‘Dominican’ and ‘Republic’.

I do not wish to remove my images from the search engines, but should we really have to simply accept that occasionally our content might tagged inappropriately by a machine simply because it has made assumptions about other words?

Tomorrow sees the opening of the 29th Summer Olympiad in China. It also sees Flickr attempt another social experiment, encouraging users to take a snapshot of life on 8-8-08.

Despite having some sympathies to the commericalism of Flickr, I still have a pro account and will be taking part (even though it is open to free accounts too).

No doubt Flickr and Yahoo will be hoping for many photos from China, and the rules for Flickr 888 basically give them the right to sell your photos for profit if they want to. Tomorrow my life won’t be as interesting but I’ve been spending the past week trying to spot potential photographs, and while I know one shot I’m intending to take, I have no inspiration for the rest of them. I’m going to have the camera with me all day, so I’ll see what comes out.