Flickr, the clever photo-sharing service that was bought out by Yahoo! earlier this year has been offering clustering displayed tags for some time now (but today was the first time I used it). I'm a big fan of this technology and I think it gives great insight into how the community functions and how lexical and visual connections are formed between the media and users on the site.

The clustering system is really useful for really finding what you want - refining your terms to get the images that are truly applicable to your need. It's interesting that while this technology is a boon to the image community, it hasn't become part of mainstream web search yet. I'm itching for the day when Google, Yahoo! and MSN roll out clustering. Clusty appears to be having some success, and since the search world is all about copying trends, can the big three be far behind?