Dopplr, Flickr & Machine Tags
July 9th, 2009, 4:48pm by JakeI twittered this morning about some new integration of Flickr & Dopplr using what Flickr calls “machine tags.” These are a special sort of tag that are interpreted by Flickr (or other web services) to serve some other function, and they usually follow a clear naming convention. A common use before Flickr introduced geotagging was to use machine tags to specify the latitude & longitude. There are also conventions that are used to identify other Flickr members in photographs. Today I noticed a blog entry about the Flickr-Dopplr (they both hate the letter e!) collaboration. You can now tag photos so that they show up on Dopplr, and so the Dopplr site is linked from the Flickr photo page.
The best way to understand this is by looking at an example– such as Fenway Park. Right now, it’s pretty well dominated by my photos since I tagged a bunch of Fenway shots. What do you think?
July 9th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Maybe it’s because I don’t know how people are using Dopplr, but I’m not sure why there’s any value to Dopplr showing location relevant photos. But even assuming that’s what you wanted, isn’t there some other way for Dopplr to access geotags already on Flickr photos? Is that openly available? Seems weird that people would go through the trouble of ever adding the Dopplr-specific tag in addition to geotagging. Or is it to associate photos with a specific vacation, like a travel log?
July 9th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I dunno. Might be handy for seeing what dishes a restaurant serves. The integration with Upcoming.org is nice, makes it easy to collect photos from an event such as The Day of the Donut.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Right, I understand linking photos to events (evite should do this), where you don’t want all photos taken at a location, but only ones manually selected. As for food, is Dopplr starting to look like a Yelp/Citisearch competitor?