In my presentations I like to say that people using social software sites like to do library type work for fun. LibraryThing might be the most glaring example of this, but there’s also AskMe. And there’s organizing and adding metadata on del.icio.ius and flickr.
Speaking of flickr, I’ve now another example. There’s a group called ID Please in which members post all sorts of insects, plants and animals for others to identify. Birders I know might like it.
I’d love to see a report on the accuracy and speed of things identified by the ID Please group and Reference Librarians. Fair comparison? Who would you bet on?
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This is a cool idea, but overwhelming. There are over 14000 items there. Luckily, you can use the tags to narrow the display to birds or whatever you like. Thanks for the tip.
I identified this dragonfly last year by searching Flickr.