Google Image Labeler

Google has an ingenious little game on their site now called the Google Image Labeler. Here's how it works:

You are paired up with another site visitor who is also willing to play. You are then each shown the same image and asked to come up with keywords that describe the contents of the image. Woman, brunette, sunset, beach, etc. The idea is to come up with matches - words that both you and your partner thought of.

Google is using this game as a way to tag images and use those tags to improve image search results. Because the more often an image receives the same descriptive keyword, the more likely that word is a good description of the image. It's a brilliant way to harness the power of the masses and make the mundane and immense task of image tagging fun.

Not every picture tells a story

I'm sorry if you spent hundreds of dollars on that stock photo. Or hours making that image look just right. Most of the time, your users don't care.

"In the case of Web design a picture isn’t always worth those thousand words… users treat pages with superfluous images like obstacle courses: The images create barriers to content."

Eyetrack studies, in which the movement of users' eyes are tracked to see where on a page they look, show that users are great at ignoring decorative imagery. Similar studies have found that users are first drawn to headlines, article summaries, and captions. They often do not look at the images at all until the second or third visit to a page. Print magazine and newspaper readers on the other hand, check out the photos first, then get on with reading.

Online, content is still king.