Flickr

= one of the main photo-sharing sites

URL = http://www.flickr.com/

Description

Mayo Fuster Morell:

"Flickr’s business model is based on free account services for basic participants and paid subscribers (“pro” accounts”) for unlimited use and special services15. Other sources of revenue in Flickr are some advertising and partnerships with third parties to sell data generated in the platform.

Flickr is based on openness to participation. Any person can register and freely use the platform, although, some of the functions are paid services. Flickr community is mainly composed of professional photographers (who use the platform as a tool for their work), amateur photographers (who develop their passion for photography and learn with the support of other Flickr participants), bloggers (who link photos to their blogs for citizens’ journalism) and private “domestic” participants (who host and share photos of daily life with others) (MacDonald, 2009). Cultural institutions with historical or artistic public photographic archives also use Flickr to enlarge the audiences for their materials. In this regard, what characterizes Flickr is the way it encompasses the diverse forms of photography, blurring to some degree the distinction between them: from private to public; from amateur to professional; from documentation to art.

Flickr is based on individual sharing or the album type of collaboration. The settings are fundamentally individual. Each participant constructs his or her own pathways through the platform. A participant can simply observe pictures or can upload pictures in order to exhibit and share photos.

Participants can converse athese photos become more easily searchable. The decentralized tagging classification and the search engine comprise the basic metadata mechanism which puts all of the materials together and links individual actions.

Additionally, each participant decides the conditions of access and reuse of the photos he or she can upload. Flickr provides both private and public image storage and each participant decides which they prefer for the photos they post on Flickr. A total of 80% of photos on Flickr are shared publicly, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos generated by the participants (Schofield, 2005; Torrone, 2004).16 Each participant also holds and chooses the license for the photos he or she uploaded. Some participants choose the creative commons license, which creates less restrictive conditions for others to reuse the photos. However, not all the participants choose the same license.

Additionally, several public and private museums which hold the world’s most prized photographic archives have built a partnership with Flickr in order to make their image collections accessible. This is called the Flickr commons. The goal of these partnerships is, on the one hand, to facilitate access to these resources in the public domain, and, on the other hand, to enrich these collections through the decentralization of Flickr participants.18 In other words, through using the collections, participants develop metadata that helps to organize and classify the material. The slogan, which synthesizes the goal of the Flickr commons project reads “Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections”.

Ultimately, there is no common goal beyond each participant’s interest in exhibiting and sharing photos, interacting with others, and classifying and commenting on photos. The resulting visual archive is the product of the synergy between each individual’s use of the platform, and not due to an explicit goal. In other words, the digital archive forms secondary outcome, not an intended one (E. Rabble, Interview, August 28, 2009). This interaction involves a very large community of participants, of which more than 50 million have registered accounts.

Additionally, there is no governance of the community by the community and the order is almost completely defined by the protocols of participation in the platform design. Yahoo! establishes the rules of and how to interact at the platform. Yahoo! is also in charge of making participants respect those rules, with the power to block or remove material uploaded by participants if it does not fit with Yahoo!s’ policy (E. Rabble, Interview, August 28, 2009; M. Alpern, Presentation at Wikimania and informal interview, August 28, 2009).

In conclusion, participants’ actions are limited to individual paths of photosharing and collaborative classification, whilst commenting on and the governance over the interaction is in the hands of Yahoo!.nd interact through each other’s photos. A typical way of actively participating consists of browsing through contacts. For example, you visit the photographs of others, comment on them or tag them, and in return others also comment on your photographs (Cox, 2008). Participants also interact by creating groups around common interests, such as groups of pictures of demonstrations, cats or pictures following a particular photographic technique. By 2007 there were 300,000 groups (Sieberg, 2007).

Participants classify the photos at Flickr following a folksonomy principle. Participants put tags in the photos they see. As participants can add tags, sets, titles and comments to photos then (though search engines) these photos become more easily searchable. The decentralized tagging classification and the search engine comprise the basic metadata mechanism which puts all of the materials together and links individual actions.

Additionally, each participant decides the conditions of access and reuse of the photos he or she can upload. Flickr provides both private and public image storage and each participant decides which they prefer for the photos they post on Flickr. A total of 80% of photos on Flickr are shared publicly, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos generated by the participants (Schofield, 2005; Torrone, 2004).16 Each participant also holds and chooses the license for the photos he or she uploaded. Some participants choose the creative commons license, which creates less restrictive conditions for others to reuse the photos. However, not all the participants choose the same license.

Additionally, several public and private museums which hold the world’s most prized photographic archives have built a partnership with Flickr in order to make their image collections accessible. This is called the Flickr commons. The goal of these partnerships is, on the one hand, to facilitate access to these resources in the public domain, and, on the other hand, to enrich these collections through the decentralization of Flickr participants.18 In other words, through using the collections, participants develop metadata that helps to organize and classify the material. The slogan, which synthesizes the goal of the Flickr commons project reads “Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections”.

Ultimately, there is no common goal beyond each participant’s interest in exhibiting and sharing photos, interacting with others, and classifying and commenting on photos. The resulting visual archive is the product of the synergy between each individual’s use of the platform, and not due to an explicit goal. In other words, the digital archive forms secondary outcome, not an intended one (E. Rabble, Interview, August 28, 2009). This interaction involves a very large community of participants, of which more than 50 million have registered accounts.

Additionally, there is no governance of the community by the community and the order is almost completely defined by the protocols of participation in the platform design. Yahoo! establishes the rules of and how to interact at the platform. Yahoo! is also in charge of making participants respect those rules, with the power to block or remove material uploaded by participants if it does not fit with Yahoo!s’ policy. In conclusion, participants’ actions are limited to individual paths of photosharing and collaborative classification, whilst commenting on and the governance over the interaction is in the hands of Yahoo!." (http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/FusterMorell-Paper.pdf)

Discussion

Flick and the strength of weak ties

Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon:

“The organisation of exchanges doesn't require the strong involvement of the whole community, but a cluster of very active participants can lead the community in producing a lot of external effects. In massive communities, the diversity of involvements and goals of users can easily be overcome. Flickr is a good illustration of the fact that collective activities result from the opportunities created by personal publication. In a statistical study based on an extraction of all Flickr accounts, we have shown that only 19% of Flickr users use the cooperative functionality of Flickr service to monitor different contacts, to bring their photos in thematic groups and to tag photos . Thus, this small minority of users is sufficient to create a massive and organized repertory of thematic pictures. Many different uses of Flickr can be observed by this way. Some use it only to store their own pictures, others to create communities of practices, and others to meet new friends as in MySpace. Yet it appears that the dynamic of this relational community depends on users' accepting to publicize at least a part of their personal production. Even if everyone is not involved in cooperative activities, in massive relational services the collective effects of cooperation can only be accomplished if there is a lot of individual participation.“

Source: The strength of Weak Cooperation. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon. Communication & Strategies, No. 65, 1st Quarter 2007.

Governance of Flickr as Infrastructure for Online Creation Communities

See: Flickr - Governance, by Mayo Fuster Morell

Flickr's Business Model

See: Flickr - Business Model, by Mayo Fuster Morell.