As much as I celebrate the revolution of public participatory media I am increasingly frustrated at the apparent apathy of some citizen media makers to properly contextualise their work through tagging (aka folksonomies) which is a form of cooperative catagorization. Without tags, your images, video and/or audio content are not searchable, public or properly “participatory.”
The philosophy of participatory media is simple: participation between viewers and makers in the production and distribution of citizen produced media. Being a citizen media producer isn’t about merely a selfish show and tell but a cooperative process that involves you taking the time to make your media accessible, user-friendly and easy to distribute on a variety of platforms. Given the amount of bandwidth required to host all that citizen media, the least a citizen media producer can do in return for all this free publicity is to properly contextualise his or her work in a meaningful and relevant way.
My recent experiences at Flickr and Ourmedia confirmed that people still aren’t bothering to tag their works. Or those who are, aren’t doing a very good job of it.
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