Metadata, and more specifically tagging, has become synonymous with the Web 2.0 experience. Tagging allows you (and more importantly, others) to quickly find information of relevance using a couple of keywords. However, if you are a content creator, it’s also time-consuming, and you risk overlooking certain keywords.
Solutions have been available for automatically tagging text for a while, but now TagCow are offering a solution for automatically tagging your photographs. The technology used (if it is indeed technology, and not an equivalent to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) appears to be intentionally vague, but the upshot is that you can upload photos to be tagged, or it can be set to automatically tag all photos in your Flickr stream. You can even provide images of your friends and family, which will then be used to identify and tag them in future photographs.