Schmaps Maps - close but no banana (updated)

A few weeks ago I received an email in my Flickr inbox. It's a rare occasion, given my photographic skills amount to little more than point, shake a bit, point at the wrong thing, get distracted - and click.

Excitedly I opened my email from Emma J. Williams, who informed me that one of my photos, of a statue in Rome, had been shortlisted for inclusion in an online European city guide map called Schmap, a neat little company busy constructing media-rich guides using Flickr photos and Yahoo! maps.

At first, my worldwide-web-weary cynicism led me to assume this was some sort of scam, and by accepting their terms and conditions I would be surrendering my IP in perpetuity and so forevermore Emma and her gang would be making millions of filthy dollars from shots of my leg looking quite nice in my wedding dress [thanks for the comment, photoboy1970, can't say I'm such a massive fan of your Thai massage shots].

But when a fellow pod-dweller (for those of you uninitiated this means someone whose desk is cojoined with mine to form part of a unit - yes, we are the peas) then mentioned he also had a photo being considered by a city guide competition and had blithely accepted their terms and conditions I decided to forget worrying about the small print, ticked the box and hoped for the best. Now it wasn't just an appeal to my vanity, it was a competition.

Come on, I'm not stupid, I knew this was marketing, but this was damned sophisticated, hands-on marketing and an excellent way to source some high quality content for free. These were smart guys.

When the third pod-dweller admitted that yes, he too had been entered into a competition for a city guide map, I did start to wonder if there was something more sinister at work, who was this Emma J. Williams anyway?

All was forgiven, however, when Emma then informed me I was on the shortlist. Perfectly timed too, as I'd just forgotten about Schmaps and ceased to worry momentarily whether they were stealing my online identity and photoshopping my husband's face onto passports to be sold to the highest and most terrifying of bidders.

And then it happened. I only bloody won, didn't I? My image of Pasquino (see above), Rome's first talking statue, something I prided myself in spotting and recording, had actually made it into a Schmap!

Feeling a little smug - and let's be frank, not entirely surprised, I clicked the link to the Schmap of Rome sent by the now grateful Emma J. Williams which linked to the map, which showed my photo, credited to me, which then led users back to my Flickr photo.

Only problem was, it was attached to a cinema called "Pasquino" which has no apparent link with the statue. I was gutted. I even checked. The address is different, just the name remains the same.

Oh Emma. You very nearly had me for life. I had actually envisaged you and a colleague, maybe with one of those mini telescope things, poring over my photo and comparing my shot to some other poor Schmoe's wondering which of us really captured the spirit of the thing.

I have sent an email pointing out their error and asking for the photo to be withdrawn given their mistake, but it feels like it'll be less use than when my mum wrote to Fenchurch Street station to complain about what she perceived to be a cartel of snack vendors operating within the station falsely raising the price of chunky KitKats.

Now with no station master to appeal to, you tell me: is this a forgivable error by a company with a very smart method of both marketing and content building? Or maybe just a good old ego bubble burst for someone who forgot this used to be called vanity publishing?

P.S. Yes, I am deliberately, petulantly and pointlessly not linking to the Schmaps site.

Later note: Emma wrote to me and apologised! The weary tone of the email suggested they were not happy with a bunch of similar mistakes. I am grateful, and everyone does make mistakes. Link to site duly reinstated (I bet that stung for a while tho).

Tagging, Labelling, Categorization

One of my criticisms of Gmail in my last post was the labelling system which is basically a version of tagging common to a lot of new web sites and services.

For those of you uninitiated and who can’t be bothered to read Wikipedia, it’s a sort of indexing by readers/users/viewers of content whereby articles, pictures, videos, even people can be associated with any word or phrase that an individual user chooses to – for either their personal use (e.g. an email in gmail) and/or the use of other people on the site (e.g. public photos on flickr). This allows for faster, more flexible ways of finding content giving dimensions of relevancy that a search engine can't compete with e.g. until last week, Leo Sayer would not have been tagged “big brother” but would be now and could have been the second he moved into the Big Brother house.

For an insight into my own crazed mind, I thought I'd review the tags I've created:

• I tag on del.icio.us mainly about work - it's a bit messy and inconsistent, but I like the fact I might help someone else find an interesting or useful article that I’ve stumbled upon and one of these days I will get around to tidying up the tags. I use other people's tags a lot here, so there's a lot of give and take going on.
  
• I tag on last.fm quite selfishly, as by tagging music here I can create virtual radio stations by tag for each of my moods - I very rarely use others' tags, occasionally music genres. On reviewing these, I'm not entirely happy that I can't edit them, as you can all find out that I find "An Old Whore's Diet" a "sexy" song.
  
• I’ve even had tag anxiety, worrying that my recent additions to Flickr may have been tagged with an incorrectly identified bridge. You can see here that I love looking at Rome as much as I do Robert.

So why, you’re dying to know, haven’t I started to tag my emails? Actually, to contradict my cynicism yesterday, I think it comes down to Gmail's great, prominent and trustworthy search. Rather like when you leave a coat on indoors before you go back into the cold, I've never felt the benefit. What each of the above tagging systems do is improve or enable existing or new services which is why I've persisted in using them.

The reason I've been thinking about this stuff is because we're currently working on a new site, and I've been considering potential features and thinking about how users would actually benefit from each of them. Would I, for example, want to tag myself, and if so - how? "Essex", "Anxious", "Ego", "Laugh", "Big" is about as good as I've come up with for now without getting into an all-too-revealing self analysis. I suppose the location and mental state might be handy for some, but possibly in order to avoid me rather than make a connection.

In fact, the other place where I find it a bit unrewarding to tag is actually the categories that I can assign to each blog post here. Tagging something “Saddam Hussein” or “Google” seems to rather overblow the importance of this blog. But I've started to do it, I have used it on occasion to find a past post, it's just a little depressing when the real thrust of each post could be much more neatly tagged as “me” “myself” and “I”.