How Tumblr And Pinterest Are Fueling The Image Intelligence Problem

The Crippling Image Intelligence Problem is a four part series that focuses on the evolution of content creation from its infancy on Facebook through content logical development into more substantive mediums like the new, massively popular, low friction, low investment content creation platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Posterous. The deluge of new content generation is fundamentally transitioning from text-dominated content to the more image-intensive content. This creates two main problems:
1) These content creation platforms powering the content explosion are geared for generating audiences of scale that incentivize the prolific creation of low-investment, transient content dominated by ‘dumb-images.’
2) Current image search technology, dominated by Google Image Search, is not properly positioned to effectively address the dearth of contextual information within images to facilitate scalable diffusion & discovery of content – meaning that an image dominated web has a crippling image intelligence problem.
Part 1, How Tumblr Drove the Evolution of Content into an Image Dominated Experience, illustrated the rise of content creation platforms driving massive increases in content & the progression of content into an image-dominated medium. This article focuses on how the frictionless, low investment strategic posture of content platforms fuels the image intelligence problem & why this is a problem for the web as whole.