(2005-01-18) Blood Technorati Tagging

Rebecca Blood: I've noticed a slight problem with the Technorati tags system. for a few hours this morning the most recent tagged photo under MLK was a picture of a protester's sign that read "Setting aside our differences to focus on our common goals: peace, love, harmony, killing Jews, and tolerance."

I called Technorati to register a protest, but was informed that Technorati had no mechanism available for removing the photo other than turning off the entire Flickr feed.

I perfectly understand and agree that a service like Technorati--or any of the blog aggregators and creators--cannot try to police the Web. But I thought Technorati would be happy to be alerted to the situation

Off the top of my head, there are several simple things Technorati could do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future

Whatever their solution, it seems clear to me that Technorati will need a way override the Flickr feed--and maybe even blog posts--in the case of egregious abuse.

Let's be clear: this is not an issue of free speech, it's a matter of automation.

sometimes the system would not run itself--a Technorati staffer might have to manually de-select a photo

Neither is this is Flickr's problem to solve.

case--tagging that is appropriate within the context of Flickr may not be appropriate to other contexts