Tagging the Semantic Web with ESP

Here's an interesting bit of online sociability: an anonymous, cooperative game that adds tags to millions of online photos, filling in a part of the metadata required to realize the Semantic Web.

The ESP Game pairs you up anonymously with another player, and shows you both an image. You both type words describing the image, and when one of your words matches a word from the other player, you get a new image. You try to match tags on 15 images in two and a half minutes.

I played for a few minutes this morning, and I have to say I found it much harder than I expected and very addictive. Basically I totally sucked at it...

...and felt strongly compelled to try to improve my score.

The social element is interesting, too. Even though the other player is entirely anonymous, and I had no way to communicate with them, I felt an obligation to do my best, so as not to "let down" my playing partner. Cooperation is a powerful motivator.

I written in the past about using positive, intrinsic motivation to encourage desired behaviors in community. This is a different kind of example than the one I cited earlier, which focused on displaying the community's behavior around an individual's content. Here the reward is primarily personal, and secondarily social.

An interesting tactic to fill in the Semantic Web's metadata gap. I'm resoundingly unconvinced, though, that this kind of approach could ever generate the consistent, complete, and ongoing tagging required to provide the human-added data element. The game is kind of fun, but I won't be back. I've got plenty of more important things to do.

In contrast, consider Flickr. People tag in Flickr to organize photos, to publicize them, and to re-find them. On Flickr the value of the tagging activity is vested in the tagged object itself, rather than in the entertainment value of the tagging activity. This strikes me as much more promising.

Comments

[Justin]

I know this is an older post, but I had to comment in light of recent events. As it stands, Google has acquired the ESP game and is surfacing it in very creative ways.

If you want to see it in Google form, search in the Google image search engine. At the top-right of each results page, you'll see "New! Google Image Labeler," and yes, it's a Google skinned ESP Game.

Another example of Google taking over the world by managing knowledge.

[Ryan]

Wow, interesting! A clear statement from Google that they see socially-created metadata as aligned with the semantic web. Thanks Justin.