The Power(house) of Flickr

Lorcan has a useful post about the Powerhouse Museum experience with Flickr Commons to date. Seb Chan there writes that their 400 images have been viewed 39,685 times in the 71 days they have been up (actually, most have been up for considerably less than the full 71 days, since the museum is loading them 50 at a time). This works out to about 1.40 views per image per day. [Update: See Seb’s correction in comments, actually about 3.5 views per image per day.]

Meanwhile I worked out last month that during our MDL Social Side of Reflections project the MDL Reflections database got about 0.18 views per image per day. Flickr is producing over 7 times the number of views that our Reflections system provides.

It is also interesting to note that Seb finds only 1% of the Flickr hits are due to search. 75% is from inside Flickr, the rest from direct references and web links. That 75% number is remarkable, and might be an indicator of the community that Flickr builds.

Also pertinent to the MDL discussion:

Tonnes of tags have been added and they have been of a quality that we’ve not experienced in our other tagging projects. I am firmly of the belief that the quality is a result of the Flickr environment (lets call it ‘culture’) and its userbase.

And:

Some notable interaction highlights include… user tagging of image content (the copious use of notes to identify features)… addition of extra information in the comments field… discussion of possible image locations like this long demolished pub in the Rocks. I like this one especially because the discussion takes place over at Yahoo Answers. This also happens within Flickr as in this example from Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.

We need to mainstream our image content. It belongs on sites like Flickr.