Flickr and Image pattern-recognition

I enjoyed the opportunity to look into how Flickr tracked patterns within their images here: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-07/Beaudoin_OctNov07.pdf

Back in my undergraduate days, I'd often used the site when looking for inspirational images for my creative writing classes, taking advantage of its ability to pull often-unexpected combinations of ideas together and display just the right image for inspiration.

I thought the inclusion of emotion-based tags such as happy, depressed to indicate mood shown in a piece was an interesting choice. While I wouldn't have likely thought to include it myself, much of my use of the site involved finding pieces exhibiting certain moods I wished to evoke in the story I had been writing. Likewise, I hadn't expected to find categorical tags for humor, poesy, or events...even including assassination as an example.
I also found it interesting that one of the tag categories I found most useful in personal use was also the single least-often used category, that being the emotion tag.

Determining what art is "Of" and "About".

I admit, I hadn't truly considered the subjective nature of some of the more famous historical photographs, prior to reading this article: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/iib.html

In particular, I found the notion that assigning an "About" to images with a complexity of meaning to them is an extremely tenuous activity, rather than an aggregate one of assigning each meaning to it, a fascinating one. With most photography and art, barring that in which abstraction obscures it, the "Of" attribute is generally clear. But even in a photo with the clearest "Of" quality to it, without a statement of intent from the author, it can be difficult to make a determination what it's "About."