Tagging web images dynamically with roll-over labels -- where's the software?

I've been wanting to edit those photos to dynamically identify the plants rather than just list them. So, I'm looking all over for simple freeware software that allows me to identify items (objects or persons) in a photograph and tag them, as is done in Facebook (much to our chagrin, sometimes, after a bad hair day gets captured). And somehow, it doesn't seem to exist. The idea is a good one, and I'm sort of amazed, given the pace of Web 2.0 development, that it isn't possible to do yet.

You can tag whole photos with thematic tags (that relate to the whole file), and you can geocode photographs to identify where they were taken on a map (the basis for the fun of Panoramio, the map features of Flickr, GoogleEarth, as well as the images connected to Googlemaps). The latter is also, obviously, a label (or, if you prefer, piece of metadata) that applies to the whole photograph. Labeling component parts still seems out of reach outside the context of applications for Facebook.

I found an Eastern European-developed software called TagHim 1.0, but it's impossible to download. Their own website has, in fact, been suspended. Perhaps it's because they spammed most software review sites with the exact same content (in noticeably non-native English), including reference to Facebook. Or, maybe they violated the terms of use for their website host. I'm not sure.

TagHim even has a YouTube video of the developer demonstrating the software with his charming Slavic accent and misspelling of "Mickey" in his process of tagging a photograph of Mickey Mouse and Pluto. It looks, effectively, like exactly what I want. Simple, free, fast, effective. What's the holdup, folks? Does anybody know anything about this?

The "espresso" book machine

An intriguing development at the University of Michigan library.

I always say that the three things I really miss about University of Texas, being a student at U of M, are the weather, the IT department and its advanced spam filters, and the incredible library system, including a Gutenberg Bible in their special collections. Well, I believe this is finally one interesting thing our library has got on the Longhorns.

Little saviours

I was really horrified the other night to find that my digital image files on my SM card had effectively disappeared in my struggling to get them to be read in either my card reader or my camera, plugged into my computer via USB. So, it was a huge relief to find that I could recover them rather painlessly with free software called Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 3.1. It's small, quick to download, and completely free. Consider me a new fan.

The other software that makes my life happier on an almost daily basis is Google Desktop. If you're not familiar with it, here's how it works. Imagine the capability of google for searching the web. Now apply that to all the files on your computer, divided into categories such as web pages you've visited, emails you've sent and received, and documents, images, and other files you have saved on your hard drive. You can set it to include or exclude certain files, like an external hard drive or a certain folder, or whatever. It is how I magically found the photos I thought I'd lost for good, from my trip to Europe in 2003, that I just posted earlier today. It was also really handy two days ago when I decided I wanted to write some prelim questions for Social Work, and knew I had written some previously, but hadn't the foggiest idea where I'd filed them away. When you search, you can identify what particular type of file you're looking for. . . Yeah, it just rocks.

A Vision of Students Today

As a teacher of anthropology, I can't help but be struck by this portrait of undergraduate students -- not only the content but also the method of conveying it, the concept of the digital ethnography.