Google's Manual Image Recognition
This is actually a fun little game to play. However, it seems to be missing some depth. The work this is based on, by Luis von Ahn at CMU, is a game first and an information extractor second. He has written about this in Computer (PDF) and has also published (PDF) the work. While this certainly seems like a good use of abundant Web users, it is an interesting turn considering their recent acquisition of Neven Vision as discussed on Google's blog. I wonder if at some point Google will implement user verification of automated metadata extraction or if these two paths will stay separate.
Google has recently added a collaborative Image Labeler application to their image search.
From the site:"Google Image Labeler is a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images and help improve the quality of Google's image search results. Each user who wants to participate will be paired randomly with a partner who's currently online... Over a 90-second period, both participants will be shown the same set of images and asked to label each image... based in part on technology licensed from and developed at Carnegie Mellon University."
