Was pointed to this today: http://riya.com/
Think about the implications this could have for family history photos..."tag locally, search globally". There are entire collections of historical photos of unknown people. This kind of technology, if spread to enough users, could begin to mine the long tail[1][2][3] of human knowledge and experience to put names with these people.
In a sense, I think genealogical research is all about the long tail. Each person has their particular niche of individuals and family lines they're interested in researching. Tools like the internet, and hopefully, the church's new family history system, help to facilitate the needs of the long tail by exposing obscure and previously hidden information, each piece of which, while of low relevance to a mass-market, could be crucially important to a few individuals (on both sides of the veil).
In another sense, exposing APIs to large data collections also facilitates the long tail, as it allows anyone who wants to to scratch their personal itch. This is, in my mind, is a large part of the spirit of open source, in that everyone has their own personal interests and passions. Open source software (and open APIs) allows each individual to pursue those interests and passions (from a software standpoint) in a way unencumbered by constraints imposed by how a design team or a corporation thinks software and data ought to be used and/or accessed. I could extend that idea to agency vs. coercion, but that might be a stretch :-).
Just some thoughts, [1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html [2] http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list Ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss