Michael Zimmer.org

It was confirmed last week that Google is acquiring Like.com, a visual search engine that focuses on helping people shop for clothing and accessories online. While most stories are spinning this as Google’s attempt to improve its product search engine and make inroads into the e-commerce marketplace, I see this acquisition differently.
It is important to realize that before Like.com was helping people find shoes and watches online, its technology was the core of Riya, a photo sharing and search site that allowed users to upload, tag and search images based …

Last fall I had the pleasure of participating in a “Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine” hosted by the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. My talk at that event outlined the unique privacy threats that are emerging as search engines — like Quaero — increasingly focus on indexing multimedia content (images, videos, etc), as well as traditional Web pages.
Following up on this discussion, the Institute of Information Law at the University of Amsterdam are holding an Expert Workshop on”Audiovisual Search: …

The Google Operating System blog reports that when uploading pictures for your contacts, Gmail will ask you to crop the picture, to separate the face of the person. The result? Google has a database of multiple images for a lot of people, along with their names, e-mail addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, and whatever else contact information you include.
Combined with Riya, where users have upoaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya’s servers and tagged and labeled the subject’s faces to be searchable via Riya’s facial recognition technology, we are …

A few months ago I blogged about Riya, a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial recognition technology. Users have uploaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya’s servers and tagged and labeled the subject’s faces to be searchable via Riya’s facial recognition technology.
Now Riya is moving ahead by applying the same facial recognition technology (and the facial profiles already learned from those 7 million uploads) to all images found on the web. While they couch the benefits in terms of being …

My earlier musings on Web 2.0′s focus on the collection of (personal) metadata and the potential for the commercial aggregation of images of my likeness come into renewed focus with the launch of Riya (needs IE6 for PC; Firefox for Mac). Riya is a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial and text recognition technology. Here’s how it works: you upload your photo library to Riya and “tag” the faces in your photos by putting a box around them and labelling it …