receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

Steven Wood is a designer and freelance software developer based in Nuremberg, Germany. He studied Media Engineering at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg and specialises in interface design and 3D web applications. His diploma thesis Tag Galaxy website, a spacey Flickr remix, has been featured on countless blogs and has had over half a million visitors since it was launched in May 2008. At "MashupAwards", it was mashup of the month this summer (http://mashupawards.com/tag-galaxy).

With the creation of Tag Galaxy, Steven Wood wanted to explore the way that people use tags and the connections that become visible when this usage is viewed on a large scale. Tag Galaxy lets you browse photos intuitively via virtual planetary systems representing related tags. The application itself does not know of any logical connection between the concepts described by the tags, but as it observes the literally billions of photos which have been tagged by the users of the photo sharing site Flickr, their choices become apparent and a certain level of collective intelligence is achieved.

The distance between the Tag Galaxy planets and the sun is based on the quality of the search results each planet represents. Their size is calculated from the percentage of results their images contribute to the current set. Each new level is an intersection of results with the previous one, allowing the user to dig deeper with every click.

Steven Wood is working on a new version of Tag Galaxy and hopes to be able to launch it soon, but has to fend various attempts to commercialize the app first.

Website:
http://stevenwood.de
http://taggalaxy.com