Geodog

Late night thoughts on browsing the Iraq tag on Flickr

One of the most striking developments in the web over the last year has been the sudden popularity of sites like Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us, where users can categorize the data or photos they save with keywords, more colloquially called tags. Everybody in what Kellan has called the Internet chattering classes has been talking about tags, and a word for them, folksonomy, has even been coined, discussed and debated. Even Mr. Metacrap himself has signed on as an advisor to Flickr, and can be found on Flickr happily adding metadata to his photos.

I've always been reluctant to rely on someone else to store my data. I tried each service soon after it was released, but didn't find any of them compelling enough to use on a daily basis. Furl I liked, but I was nervous about having all my data stored for me on the net by a company without an obvious business model, and then I found a better way to store data locally using Slogger. Del.icio.us I tried but couldn't make heads or tails of until Joshua Schachter explained it in person at ETech 2004. Flickr I tried at the same ETech, but at the time I was blocking Flash in my browser, so all I ever got was a blank screen. So much for being an early adopter.

However, I have recently started to use Flickr and Del.icio.us on a regular basis. Why? Because they turn out to be great ways of following a conversation on the web. I display the RSS feed for my Del.icio.us subscriptions on one of my personal portal pages, and it updates hourly with what other people have bookmarked about topics that interest me. I couldn't make the John Battelle's Web 2.0 conference this year, but in addition to reading the blog coverage and press coverage, I searched Flickr's web20 tag and got a good idea of who I know who was there.

Once, months before the fact that US soldiers were torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib was revealed to the world, I came across a site where American soldiers in Iraq were posting photographs on the internet and wrote about it. I wondered at the time what the effects on our democracy would be of soldiers being able to send photos of their experience directly to the citizens, unmediated by our media conglomerates. As we found out from the photos taken at Abu Ghraib and leaked to the press by soldiers outraged at what Bush has done to the proud American army, the effects can be very powerful. But it was still hard for the average American internet user to see photos taken by American soldiers in Iraq -- I still get hundreds of web searchers every day, drawn by my earlier post and looking for soldiers iraq photos.

Tonight when I went to Flickr, I decided to see if any soldiers in Iraq were using Flickr to post photos. I searched on the tag Iraq, and found 135 pictures that people had posted. Not all of them were from soldiers in Iraq -- some were from protests against the war, some of them were political posters for and against the war, but most of the pictures were from soldiers in Iraq. Almost all of the pictures are from who you would expect to have time and ability to post things to the internet, bored REMFs at American bases in Iraq. Still, any American with access to the Internet can go today and see these pictures posted recently by American soldiers at war (click on the pictures to go to the originals on Flickr):

Clearly, while there are points of view expressed in some of these pictures, Flickr is still small enough that no one is trying to game it for political purposes, although I suspect that is coming very soon. However, in a more interesting sign of things to come, besides American soldiers posting their pictures, I found at least one Iranian who had posted a picture of himself atop a destroyed Iraqi tank:

What happens when Iraqis start posting pictures on a (soon to be) popular photo portal where it is easy for Americans (geeks now, general populace to come soon) to find them? What happens when pro- and anti-occupation Iraqis start posting graphic pictures to make their points? What happens when we have an unmediated, high emotional impact, people-to-people conversation with video and pictures? Just like my last post on American soldiers in Iraq posting photos on the web, I don't have the answer to those questions either, except that I know the results have the potential to be as explosive as the Abu Ghraib photos.

If you want to follow the changing nature our media consumption and communication, I recommend subscribing to the RSS feed for the Iraq tag on Flickr -- I expect it will be a very interesting journey over the next year, no matter who our next president is.