[cc-community] Ookaboo now has nearly a million images and allows user selection of images

Paul Houle paul at ontology2.com
Thu Aug 11 21:33:02 EDT 2011


        It's been a long time since I've written anything to publicize 
my site

http://ookaboo.com/

     but a lot of changes have been going on.  Perhaps the biggest one 
is that the site's gotten much bigger -- it now has nearly 950,000 
creative commons images of 500,000 precisely defined topics.

     We've recently launched a feature that lets users select images 
they find on Flickr and attach them to precise topics.  This is a bit 
like 'tagging',  but it's more accurate because the topics come from 
Freebase and DBpedia.  We've imported a lot of pictures that were used 
on Wikipedia,  and we're trying to herd users towards finding pictures 
of topics that are poorly represented now but are well represented on 
Flickr.  For instance,  our old process didn't get a lot of pictures of 
food,  but lots of people take creative commons pictures of food on 
Flickr.  Where Wikimedia Commons is full of old government photos of 
WWII Aircraft,  people will upload pictures taken at airshows to 
Flickr,  so this represents a different point of view.

      Anyway,  this is turning out not to just be a technological 
problem but also a problem of community building,  and I know it needs a 
lot of work from a UI perspective and in terms of getting people 
motivated.  If you're interested at all,  I'd suggest you subscribe to 
our RSS feed of recent photos (so you can see how things are going) and 
that you sign up for our Google Group

http://groups.google.com/group/ookaboo

       Any thoughts?


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