Title *

SummaryOverview of technical social and legal implications of an Image Wiki and an Image Commons.

Description * The ImageWiki project comes out of a year long conversation between all of us over at http://makerlab.org. Paige, who comes from an arts background, kept asking for a way to visually search for similar images. It took us all a while to figure out what a good idea it was - and once we saw the implications we sat down right away and knocked out a site. *The implications,* In the near future a variety of companies are going to release tools that let you use your cellphone camera as a way to let you find out more about something. You will be able to point your camera at a restarant menu and find comments and reviews about the food. You will be able to find out more about a book, a poster, a music album or anything else that you point your camera at. You'll be able to leave virtual notes attached to graffiti that only your friends can see. What is going to make this all possible is recent advances in computer robot vision and in available computer processing power. The image recognition tools are getting good enough that a computer can now tell you if an image that you are looking at is similar to an image that it has already seen. *Words and Letters will no longer be the only input medium,* This may create a huge shift in how we can engage with computers and with each other. We've been largely interacting with our machines by using words and text. Modern computers have keyboards or touch pads that are designed to help act as a bridge between us and the knowledge we are seeking. And most of us are pretty good at using a keyboard to communicate with a computer. In the last few years however there has been some frustration with having to type things in. This is especially true in the mobile space. It is hard to type in a long URL for a website when you are using a keypad or even an IPhone with a little keyboard. *QRCodesand Barcodes may be obsolete,* Projects like IMatrix and others have sprung up to try and address this. In the IMatrix approach they encourage the use of carefully defined images called "QR-Codes" that a computer can easily recognize. You can point your camera at one of these images and it can retrieve some actual content. This is useful because as a QR-Code creator you can stick a QR-Code onto something that you want people to be able to find out more about. But it also has drawbacks in that QR-Codes are basically ugly and have to be "pre defined" by a creator. Searching on pure images meets both aesthetic demands and functional demands and in a way is more in line with how humans interact with each other - by this metric it may very well be that barcodes and QRCodes will disappear from human civilization. *Social Image Anchors,* What is possible now is that a pure image by itself can be used to retrieve an URL or some content, and this opens up the door to a whole new spectrum of possibilities. One of the possibilities is the idea of social image search - where anybody can decorate any image with their own comments and opinions - this creates a socially framed context around an image and the image itself becomes a kind of anchor for conversations. Such a capability is hugely useful for people who want to be able to leave notes for friends. Effectively images become just like websites - and the same energy and passion that people bring to conversations on the web can now be associated with individual images. *Who owns the images we use?* Who owns the image rights to associate a given image with a given piece of information? Is this going to be one company - a new version of Network Solutions? In many ways images are like music. They are a subjective experience, beauty or meaning is often in the eye of the beholder. In some ways the person who consumes the image adds at least half of the value; it is their choice to value the image that makes it valuable. At the same time the creator of the image deserves credit for understanding how to make something that people care about. In traditional society the creator owns the image - the rights to the image - its reproduction - and soon the associated discoverable metadata - will probably belong to the creator. This however under-represents the social value of images. Images need to be freely redistributable, and need to have objective comments associated with them - not simply the brand that the creator chooses to define. Clearly businesses work hard to create brand associations between certain images and certain ideas; this will have to start to change as people start to use images as a way to share meaning. *Semantically relating content,* Beyond this there are lots of exciting possibilities. Photosynth is a good example of where the semantic relationships between images help add value to images. And in the future, as these tools become better at recognizing human faces, there are all kinds of interesting social repercussions that will happen. *This projects role,* On the ImageWiki Project we are raising the issues pointed above and we are going to work very hard to define an "image commons" that is not owned by any one interest but that is truly open. Part of the way we think that has to happen is that we will try to encourage "image handling brokers" where we'll provide our own image matching service but will try to foster more of a brokerage or ecosystem where an image search request is farmed out to any listeners that are interested and those listeners can all take a shot at trying to advise on what the best result it. *Join us!* We want to talk about images, to explore the medium, to see where it takes us. We hope you'll join us for the ride!