Tag Archives: Flickr

Flickr and Library of Congress – the Founders would be pleased

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Yahoo’s Flickr is teaming up with the Library of Congress to bring a lot more public photos to light, and perhaps as importantly use community comments to help categorize the pictures.    The US Government has an almost incomprehensible amount of information in various places and formats, and we need to applaud all efforts to get that data online for all to experience or use in research.

Matt at the Library’s blog says the project hopes to:  

… ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

Great work!     In a decade or so one can imagine that the web will be a respository for hundreds of billions of photos covering most of the earth, and tagged with data to help identify even many historical and geographic nuances that can only be understood through community input.    Will this bring world peace?  Nope, but it’ll be cool.

Setup Flickr to Blog in 30 seconds or less

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Flickr remains my favorite “Web 2.0” thingie and I think it is one of the best applications ever done for a computer.   I’m always thrilled with the simplicity of making simple changes to bring dramatic results.  

For example you can post your flickr pictures to your blog, which is great.    Also great is that the setup routine for doing this is as simple as you can get.    I just added photo capabilities to the new blog I’m writing for the big Travel and History site we are creating from two previous efforts at Online Highways and US History:     blog.u-s-history.com 

This took me about 30 seconds as follows:

1) Log in to Flickr Account

2) Go to “Extend Flickr” section on your Flickr Accounts page
3) Add blog
4) Pick from the list they’ll have of your blogger blogs if you’ve already signed one up.   

done

If you are signing up a blog for the first time you’ll need to give some access permission, but that is not very complicated.

The cool think is that then you can go to flickr and click “blog this” and post pictures at the blog quickly and easily.

And, just like the song says:   If a picture paints a thousand words, then why bother writing 1000 words, which takes a lot more time!

Yahoo! WAKE UP!

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It’s very frustrating being a Yahoo shareholder.

Not because Yahoo isn’t a good company, in fact Yahoo is a *great* company.

Not because Yahoo doesn’t seem to “get it”, Yahoo arguably “gets it” better than almost all other companies in terms of Web 2.0, the social networking space, and in terms of the importance of open architectures and developer support.

Not because Yahoo doesn’t have any of the lucrative search market share. They are the clear 2nd place in search with huge search activity and over 20% of global internet search traffic.

It’s frustrating because despite all the advantages, Yahoo just can’t seem to capitalize on all these advantagesto turn a good buck, monetize the site to full potential, and increase my share price. Google, with total traffic levels about the same as Yahoo, has a stock capitalization some *FIVE TIMES* that of the company with arguably very similar potential for profits.

Little internet companies and even many very big ones have a good excuse for failing in profitability – online biz is a cold and cruel world and for all the but the huge players everything can turn on a dime. Yahoo, on the other hand, has no good excuse for failing. They are a market maker in terms of online search, global internet reach, online video, and …. this just in for me …. they are HUGE in the Social Networking space. Yes, that would be the social networking space everybody is so excited about. What do I mean by HUGE? Let’s review this graph from Compete.com via TechCrunch.

First we need to note that Compete.com is not even remotely a perfect measure, and also adding “unique visitors” in this fashion is counting some folks twice. Also, they are listing sites like Geocities that are arguably not social sites, though I’d argue they could be “open socialed” quickly with an effort in that direction. Since the overlap at these traffic levels is probably not a very big deal, and also assuming they spend time as if the Yahoo properties are separate sites their ad potential may be the same as if they were different folks, these numbers are important and relevant.

So, the big players first:

Myspace: 72 million unique visits in October

Facebook: 33 million

Yahoo: 38 million …..

<screeching reverse halt noise here>

What? Yahoo has more social traffic than Facebook?! Yes they do if you add Flickr and Geocities and Yahoo Groups.

Aside from the fact that Caterina and Stuart and the Flickr gang are probably thinking they sold out a bit too cheap at only 20 million, Flickr is an astounding success with some 14 million users and growing. Personally, I’d rather hang out at Flickr than Facebook anyway.

So, where does this huge number of users in the Yahoo social networking juggernaut leave us?

Frustrated baby, frustrated……