{"id":794,"date":"2010-06-08T14:32:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T13:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=794"},"modified":"2010-06-08T14:32:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-08T13:32:54","slug":"sort-a-toe-in-the-cloud-working-at-web-scale-with-flickr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2010\/06\/sort-a-toe-in-the-cloud-working-at-web-scale-with-flickr\/","title":{"rendered":"SORT – A toe in the cloud: working at web scale with Flickr"},"content":{"rendered":"

The afternoon at Survive or Thrive starts with a presentation from Jo Pugh from the National Archives talking about their experience of using Flickr.<\/p>\n

National Archives – archive of the British Government – contains everything from 11th, 12th century manuscripts, to the web archive of the last UK government.<\/p>\n

Jo made 8 arguments for putting pictures on flickr:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Be a ‘shop window’ bringing content to new audience<\/li>\n
  2. User tagging will creat folksonomies – which will make things easier to find<\/li>\n
  3. Content will proliferate acrsoss the site<\/li>\n
  4. It supports annotation – tool for teaching\/learning<\/li>\n
  5. Users will tell us more about our collectionat than we know<\/li>\n
  6. Users will embed content on their own sites and so can the National Archives<\/li>\n
  7. Users will repurpose large bodies of our content in interesting ways in mashups<\/li>\n
  8. Users can post their own content<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Perhaps also some arguments over speed (faster to upload to flickr than locally?), and familiarity (people already using Flickr)<\/p>\n

    Cost – $25 per anum is a pretty good deal for putting pictures online. Low resource means low risk.<\/p>\n

    Working at webscale doesn’t mean people are going to start using your content automatically. It’s Flickr that is working at webscale – not your content. Flickr ‘Commons’ helps – exclusive membership and more likely to get interested audience. The National Archive collection is almost exclusively ‘Crown Copyright’ – whereas Flickr Commons default is ‘no known copyright restrictions’ – although as National Archive have power of Crown Copyright they can allow reuse – which also fits Flickr definition of ‘no known copyright restrictions’<\/p>\n

    Jo wants to be the Library of Congress (i.e. emulate their success on Flickr) – currently only achieving a 10th of the views that LoC has achieved.<\/p>\n

    Jo saying the user community on Flickr (specifically Commons) to be ‘good’ – tend to attribute when they use etc. Compared to wikicommons for example. However you still have to expect the unexpected – e.g. this re-editing of a photo http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/big_lion_head\/4463202111\/<\/a><\/p>\n

    However, need to be careful to judge use and reuse – it is all engagement with content and difficult to judge value of this.<\/p>\n

    There is a developer community working around Flickr – need to think about engaging them – they may build stuff you’d like to have done:<\/p>\n