Flickr is commonly held up as one of poster children for tagging. Now I like tagging quite a lot (see my del.icio.us if you don't believe me), but for me, tagging is not really the reason that I use Flickr. I use Flickr as a way to "force" myself to think about photography every day. The way that I do this is by subscribing to Flickr content via RSS, and you can subscribe to just about anything on Flickr using RSS, except for say, the interesting photos (cough, cough). I'm not really interested in topical slices (regardless of who did the slicing) of photostreams, which is what tagging gives you (although I do appreciate those who have tagged their pictures with the particular lens that they used to make the picture). About the only time is use tags is to search for conference pictures. I'm taken in by particular people -- their style, their subjects, their settings. It's all about the people in Flickr.

Which brings me to an annoying thing about Flickr. You can add people to your contacts list and then subscribe to a single feed of pictures from the people in your contacts list. The problem is that the RSS feed only gives you the single most recent picture from each person. That just doesn't make it for me, so the other day, I went through and subscribed to the individual photostream feeds from people in my contacts list. There ought to be a setting somewhere...