It’s not for everyone, but the Google Image Labeler is the best tagging application I’ve ever seen. It does a great job of filtering out spam by matching you with another human being to concurrently tag items. This avoids any sort of oddities with linguistic issues such as car vs. auto because both people have to use the same lexicon. This is crowd sourcing at it’s best.

A similar system could be implemented using caching to hold submissions for sites with significantly lower traffic than Google (that’s pretty much all sites right?) Once an image is tagged by 2-3 individuals, it could be “accepted.” Determining who’s who of course becomes the challenge, but a mixture of IP, user names, session information or any other number of “fingerprint” type technologies could help narrow it down to a reasonably accurate representation. Additionally, you could expire words after a predetermined time. Additionally, the concerns of spam may be trivial since 20 character tags are hardly helpful for spammers promoting products. Of course Google’s method avoids all caching all together by only letting live posts associate with the image.

The other thing Google does is make tagging a game. While this is hardly sufficient to help people get motivated to actually use the application for long periods of time, it’s a good effort and it can be addictive. Points are awarded to folks as the complete matches, giving them little actual value beyond seeing their names on a Google top 5 leader board (if they make the cut).

Last night I downloaded the full release of Opera Mini 4.1 and so far I have to say I am impressed. The new URL location bar works like a typical browser which is great! The new integrated download is fantastic too. The application feels faster, but I’m lacking in any data to support that claim. I was able to upload a small image to Flickr so it all seems as advertised.

There are some things that still don’t work though. You still can’t select a page URL within the application and say mail it to a friend. Also, WordPress 2.5.1 doesn’t seem to work fully because of AJAX issues. Generally, if the site/app your accessing is AJAX based, it won’t work. The input fields in forms still require clicking on them to bring up the input interface. JQuery library doesn’t seem to work correctly either, in fact support under 4.0 seemed better.

I also found the constant permissions nagging about accessing the local device content frustrating. That’s no fault of the software, but rather the applications permissions. However, the dialog from the phone often was unreadable due to a UI glitch. Blindly selecting “Yes” seemed to power through it. Opera should provide a guide to users installing the application so they can get assistance navigating the sea of permissions when installing. If you’re like me, still without a full browser bundled with your phone, I strongly recommend taking a look at Opera Mini.