We started Ookaboo because we weren't happy with the state of the art in free photograph collections. Although we've improved on the accuracy of image search, so far, we've done a poor job of organizing topics in our browsing interface. This is a consequence of choices we've made: to scale our process to 500,000 topics, we made no effort to organize the topics before inserting them.

We've rolled out the first software upgrade in a series that will improve navigation in Ookaboo. Initially we're tackling the problem of topics that are categories, such as "City", "Car", "Person" and "Animal". An example of a new page can be found here: Pictures of cities.

Overall, Ookaboo has a network instead of a hierarchical organization -- it's just not useful to organize a collection of very different topics into a single hierarchy. We've discovered, however,
that about 50% of topics in Ookaboo are part of two large hierarchies: the hierarchy of geographical subdivisions and the hierarchy of living things -- we're filling gaps in our knowledge base so that we can build these hierarchies into our navigation as we improve the relevance of the network that interconnects everything else.

In prototyping our first category pages, we discovered that our photo mosaics looked much better against black backgrounds that white. We've been considering a shift from a white background to black for at least a year, but the results of prototyping led us to make the jump now.