Why does Google hate the word tag?
Google Image Labeler is a good idea but a terrible name – it sounds like a product Dymo might have created. Google has licensed “The ESP Game“, invented by Luis von Ahn, and is harnessing collective intelligence to tag images in its image database. This is just an experiment, of course. But it’s a clever one – -if a critical mass of images are tagged, Google will have solved a very intractable problem for itself.
I just wish Google would use the terminology the rest of the web has already settled upon. It’s not a label. It’s a tag. “Tag” means something – an intentional attribute given to an object on the web. That’s what we are doing here. How about we help Google come up with a new name?
If tag is off limits because of competitive issues (after all, Yahoo owns Flickr), I vote – with only a slight portion of my tongue in cheek – for “Google Image Disambiguator.”
Or maybe, Google Metadata Maximizer.
Or…what do you guys think?
(Also, you can earn points for tagging on GID. But what can you do with the points?!)