What Flickr clusters say about you

Here's a nice little meme (for "meme" read "no-brainer blog entry") for you.

First a little background, Flickr has a feature called "clusters" in which it groups tags by theme. A single tag, such as "mouse" might be applied to several different types of picture. Clustering helps you to find the right type of picture that you were looking for. For example, type in "mouse" and it presents a "keyboard computer desk" cluster and a "mickey disney disneyland" cluster. It also suggests a "cat kitten animal" cluster, suggesting that a lot of flickr users take a morbid joy in photographing their moggy's latest kill.

Flickr is clever enough to untangle the mess of tags in it's database into clusters all by itself. There's no human brain at work saying "there should be a Disney mouse cluster", it's just spotted that the tags "disney" and "mouse" crop up together often enough on everyone's pictures to merit a cluster.

So, when we use clusters, we find out what a word "means". It's kind of a living thesaurus. In a "not at all like a thesaurus" way.

So.. what does Becky "mean"? Type becky into the tag search and you get the following clusters:

"friends, wedding, party, bride, groom"

"portrait, girl, bw, blackandwhite"

"dad, family, mom"

"dave, andy, sarah, amanda, matt"

and

"vacation, ocean, beach"

So this tells us that people called Becky quite often go to weddings, look good in black and white portraits, are often moms (or dads!), like beach holidays and have friends called Dave, Andy, Sarah, Amanda and Matt.

I find that interesting, and about 40% true for me. Which is better than my horoscope! :-)

How about Simon?

"wedding, cake, liz, birthday, family"

"party, friends, london, mark, clare"

"cat, cats, bw, kitty, blackandwhite"

"animals, dog, pets, puppy, dogs"

"sydney, australia"

So Simon is another wedding goer who also likes partying with friends in London. There are a lot of Simons in Sydney (I'll have to ask Katya to corroborate that), and alarmingly a lot of dogs and cats are being called Simon these days. The poor things!

Go on, try it with your name, or your friends, you know you want to!