Welcome to the machine tag

At the same time that Flickr are demonstrating idiocy in the human resources department, they continue to do so some very cool stuff behind the scenes.

Aaron has been walking through some new API methods over on the Flickr code blog, quoting something I said in a chat with Steve Ivy:

something:somethingelse=somethingspecific

…which I don’t even remember saying but the shoe fits.

There’s something about the mix of rigidity and haphazardness in machine tags that appeals to me. While they all share the same structure, everyone is free to invent their own usage. If machine tags were required to go through a specification process we would have event:lastfm=... and event:upcoming=... instead of lastfm:event=... and upcoming:event=... but really, it simply doesn’t matter as long as people are actually doing the tagging.

With the introduction of these new API methods, it looks like there’s room to build more finely-tuned apps to pivot around namespaces, predicates and values.

Paul Mison has written an desktop-like machine tag browser which shows at a glance just how many different machine tag namespaces are out there. Quite a few pictures have been tagged with adactio:post=... since I first introduced the idea.