Flickr — Still Dominated by the Geeks
I’ve heard many people say that Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site acquired by Yahoo in 2005, “has gone mainstream.”
That’s easy to assume with it’s relatively high profile millions of users and many more millions of photographs, but it’s still very much slanted towards web-savvy users in North America.
Theage.com.au reports on an interesting Cornell study that describes, “revealing various interesting properties about popular cities and landmarks at a global scale.”
The findings show that the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, which opened in May 2006, is more popular than many other well-known tourist sites such as St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Washington Monument in the US capital.
I don’t believe it.
Well, I believe the study is accurate for Flickr users, but to make any further assumptions beyond this limited user base is foolish. This just shows how far from truly mainstream even the largest of web applications are. I’m not knocking the Apple Store, but something tells me more Americans are interested in the US Capital.
For me, this really hits home two points in this web-centric world of ours:
- We’re creating exponentially more minable data than a generation ago.
- All gleanings based on this flood of data must take this into context.
Want to see the web-centric populace slanting data toward the modern age in action? Check out the revision history of Wikipedia’s entry on Swine Flu. At this rate soon it will eclipse the combined importance of everything that happened in say, 1958. Sorry 1958.