Totallly aside from the photo, I've just had an interesting chat about metadata with a mate and now it occurrs to me that there is some *potentially* interesting contextual data to this pic.

Bear with me... :-)

My dad actually took the picture and asked me to post it on Moblog. He just thought it was funny and wanted to get it online to show people.

Then everyone comments on it - which I'm really chuffed about - but also make a whole new connection to it, that is meaningful to this group (which Joe's fiance's nickname is Shoes), and serendipitously it is also Joe's stag night before he goes off to marry her!

So, all in all, the picture became more than just a funny picture, it also happened to link to a specific moment. Like a twist of fate in the system. Tagging would actually allow me to capture that moment in a different way- in a way similar to how i might remember that picture - not necessarily by how I would describe it's content but by how i might describe it's relevance.

It's purpose sort of evolved to potentially more than just a funny picture, but an event online that signalled to a group of people, "Joe and Shoes are getting married!"

It's something I'd probably remember anyway, as the image "spoke to" a deeper context, but now I could also tag the picture to associate that personal association. I could also tag it so that others could remember it, or use the same tags as somebody else to help compile a communal gallery of associated images. In this case it might be images for Joe, for Joe from me, for Shoes from me, for Joe and Shoes, for Joe's stag night, or simply a mark of the occasion.

Tagging is also an action until itself so it's not like i'd have to record the metadata actually true to it's original intention for posting. In hindsight the purpose of the image has grown and a matrix of intentions to recall it have expanded from it, so now I could remeber it as such and share that connection with others.

So, in that sense, what's ultimately important is my intentions when I tag it. What's more, I can make up new intentions just by adding a new tag.

In a sense the tag allows me to compile multiple stories of what happened immediately surrounding that image. I could associate words with my dad's story, my story, Joe's story, and even Moblog's story. It's like tags allow me to signature experiences from posting something to the internet.

Maybe I need that... given I'm plugged in all day. (My Metadiary)

Nonetheless, this all still proves to me that you could do some incredible things with tags. A communal awareness for tagging could mean one could essentially search their own or others interepretations of web pages, construct narratives of online events and create historical significace. They'll call it 'tagged browsing'. Just search "Eureka"!

Chris Anderson talking on ITConversations

Bollywood's distributed demand

I've often pointed to the Indian film industry as a perfect Long Tail candidate. Each year Bollywood makes at least 800 films. In American alone, there are 1.7m people who are first or second generation Indians, most of whom can speak Hindi (the main language of Bollywood films)."

USA Today, Longtailing bigtime

There's a start-up called Akimbo that's about to ship a product. Its initial programming will be soccer from Europe. It'll have things from India and from other cultures that have never been available because they don't have large-enough audiences to go on satellite or cable, but they have a plenty large-enough, and certainly devoted-enough, audience to go over the Internet."

"Last fall, Wired magazine identified a trend it dubbed "the long tail," and the term has since caught fire in tech and media circles. Basically, it says that in an era of almost limitless choice, many consumers will gravitate toward the most popular mass-market items, but just as many will move toward items that only a few, niche-market people want.

Take music in an age of Amazon.com and iTunes. A lot of music buyers want the hot new releases. But just as many buy music by lesser-known artists or older music — songs that record stores never would be able to carry but that can be offered online. All that small-market, niche music makes up the long tail.

Until the past few years, mass-market entertainment ruled the industry. In this new digital era, the long tail is becoming at least as powerful a force."

Eric Schmidt, Longtailer

How Google serves the longtail.

The origins of "The Long Tail"

"To be precise, what I coined was the notion of looking at the tail itself as a new market. The use of the proper noun (including "The") is not incidental, but is intrinsic to the observation that we have historically looked at the market at the head of the curve in isolation, and we can now shift our gaze to the right and see that the tail is another market."

The Economist does the Long Tail

"Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler? In fact, says Mr Anderson, the idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent phenomenon: before radio and television, he notes, countries did not operate in "cultural lockstep". And the notion of shared culture is already in decline, thanks to the rise of cable television and other forms of market fragmentation. The long tail will merely accelerate the effect. There will still be blockbuster movies, albums and books, but there will be fewer of them. The companies that will prosper, says Mr Anderson, will be "those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches."