I do well selling ads on a fashion directory, I do better mining my search terms which define fashion in real time.

Concerning the validity of the data. Before I upload my images to my Flikr account, I edit them which removes the meta data. I am curious if this is common or if it's common among a certain type of user. Still, the results don't really surprise me; they reflect pre-digital camera sales and, I suppose, highlight the benefits of using tennis stars to sell product.

Of course, these are all high-end consumer cameras, which reflects flickr's affinity group. It's interesting to look at, but I'm not sure how much real value you can draw from it.

I would suspect that if they actually put numbers and dates on X and Y axis, you'd see that there's a lot of dispersion and that the "most popular" is less than 10%.

Paul: you are SO RIGHT! We are at the beginning trend of consumer web services...wait it's just media on the net.

Nice post and very relevant!

Smart flickr - now you get a treat :)

I posted my comments here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/flickr-does-market-research

Two issues I see: 1) very good point about the honey pot of data out there. And it will probably lead to another round of discussions about data privacy.

2) As the saying goes, the devils in the details. I was glad to see that Flikr did their analysis based on percentage of users. If this type of honey pot analysis grows, then we all need to make sure the publisher is transparent of their methods or else roll up our sleeves to sort through the lies, darn lies, and statistics...

I thought this was post was going to be about tagging trends, like, graph wedding photos by month, etc.

Flickr gets you to pick your model from a list, which works because the universe of camera models is limited. Where the data universe is broader (if Flickr were to do tagging trends, for example), an alternative is to generate trends directly from a free text search. We've done this with our Job Trends:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends

As you say, we'll surely see more and more trend tools from web services.

Nice post. I think you're spot on that there is a growing trend and interest around metadata and its application in real world contexts that will likely result in new business models.

Flickr's new Camera ratings feature is certainly testament to the potential application of user-generated [meta]data in a consumer / business context.

That said, I think privacy concerns over the use of user-generated data in general, and metadata in particular may cause a backlash and user revolt if you simply give away the software and sell the [meta]data.

Isn't this what all the boutique web2.0 "beta" sites do today? Give away their services for free and sell their usage data and statistics to spammers (uhhh I mean ad agencies) while seeding their sites with Adsense / Adwords to generate enough revenue to keep them afloat?

Interesting post that one. Problems to overcome

1. When you start analyzing the data coming out its good - Flickr or anybody else for that matter should not probably alter their way of working to increase or decrease the data collected

2. Data privacy of course would be a key factor

3. The belief around information is the more the number of people who have it the less important it becomes - if it is not public information of what data is analyzed users might get a little worried

This is definitely a cool release, but including live, linkable photos would make me uncomfortable, partly since I pay for flickr and partly because going away from the aggregate and towards the specific individual's use raises some privacy concerns. I might be just paranoid there but it feels like linking my actual photos to aggregate product data feels creepy.

The data Flickr provides is very interesting. I tried focus more on the popularity of the camera phones, as opposed to the means to provide this data. I find it interesting how popular camera phones are becoming, and how much they are utilized by people. You can check out my post here:
http://almanazir.typepad.com/almanazir/2006/11/who_makes_the_m.html

Paul, I think this is an awesome article, and I quote you in my article Ladder of Knowledge about WordPress.com today making public 99% of our internal aggregate stats.

ireally could care less about this page

ireally could care less about this page

I have the same problem as Philip. The extension worked for two days, after that it will clear the window and not display anything. I tried to uninstall mozilla, delete the profile and extensions and reinstall, but no luck :(

Nice post and very good.