I read someone mentionning spamming. I don’t think that would be a problem. Google most probably uses a cookie to verify if different users post the same content, (Google uses cookies everywhere), so if only one person spams “Texas Holdem Poker”, then it will not be considered.

At first I was skeptical too. For example, I see a picture of Ron Jeremy, I write Ron Jeremy as a “label”, but my label does not match off-limits’ tags such as “man”, therefore no points are earned. But remember, these images will be shot at more people playing the game, and if someone else mentions the label “Ron Jeremy”, then that image will have more value attached to that name than to the more commonly used “man”, because Google is smart. If the image has been exposed to 60 people and 50 labeled it “man” (among other labels), if 5 out of 50 said “Ron Jeremy”, then “Ron Jeremy” will have more power than “man”. This makes no sense? It actually does– Google knows what are the common words (car, tree, sky, river) and it will focus and specific names and words that are repeated.

John: And when did Photoshop Album come out? 2003? The word “label”, used in the machine learning community to mean an annotation for an object, such as an image, still predates Adobe by at least 25 years, if not more. Adobe, much less Flickr, did not even exist in the mid-70s.

Face it, “tag” is a recent re-invention. “Label” is the historically correct term. Google has it right on this one.

No, wo don’t tag we label.. we are google, we are unique Very smart.

Fantomaster writes: Full agreement on the “tags” contention – they’re not labels, so why call them such? Isn’t that the kind of we-are-so-special-we-will-do-what-we-like-never-mind-the-standards attitude that once made Microsoft one of the best hated companies on earth within the Web techie community?

Look, I do not work at Google, so my guess is as good as any, I suppose. But I have to disagree with most of you who have commented here. The overwhelming consensus seems to be that Google is doing something new by using the word “label” instead of “tag”. How wrong that viewpoint is!

If you look at the field of machine learning, which has many of its roots in AI, you will see that there has long been classification of machine learning algorithms into two approaches: “supervised” and “unsupervised”. The difference between the two comes down to whether or not there is labeled training data on which an algorithm can base its inferences.

Machine learning itself has been around longer than Google has existed. The word “label” to mean some sort of keyword associated with an object has been used in the machine learning community for quite some time, and definitely predates all this Web 2.0 “tag” hoo-hah.

Now, if you look at Google, you will realize that they hire a whole lotta machine learning PhDs. It is therefore only natural that folks with that experience would choose the word with both historical precedent as well as current active usage in the literature.

Maybe in the Web 2.0 world, “tag” predates “label”. But that is one of the big problems I have with Web 2.0..they are just inventing the wheel all over again, and have no clue as to what went on before. Web 2.0 does not predate Machine Learning.

For that matter, don’t even get me started on the word “folksonomy”. Thirty years ago there were debates in the information retrieval community about manual vs. automatic indexing (i.e. searching documents by using either human labels (“tags”) or full-text content). And within the manual indexing area there were debates about constrained versus unconstrained vocabularies. A constrained vocabulary is a taxonomy. Wanna guess what an unconstrained vocabulary is?

“Tags” and “folksonomies” are nothing more than unconstrained vocabulary, manual indexing.

So, who really knows why Google chose to use the word “label” instead of “tag”. But by so doing they are actually returning to historical roots, rather than jumping on some bandwagon.