The MOST popular camera amongst Flickr users is……………….. posted at IndianPad.com…

Examples here:
http://www.rrove.com/place/item/11103/st.-peter’s-basilica
http://www.rrove.com/place/item/11094/colosseum

So hows that for layers auto-created info on user-generated content?

Thanks for pointing this out! You could spend hours mining this data as I’m sure some of the digital camera vendors will be doing over their leftovers this weekend.

It really shows the skew of the demographics of Flickr to the advanced amateur and photo hobbyists. It also shows Canon’s dominant position in this segment.

Even though Kodak and SONY are top selling consumer DC brands, they are very under represented in the universe of Flickr photos. SONY has only two models with over 1 million photos, Kodak does not have any, their top model has 695K photos. Compare that to Nikon, with 8 models (not just dSLRs) with more that 695K photos and Canon has 33 models with more than 695K photos!

Some other interesting numbers:

Total Number of Photos (from Flickr’s data):

Canon 75 Million
Nikon 26 Million
SONY 22 Million
Olympus 13.9 Million
Kodak 10.6 Million

Happy Thanksgiving!

Myron

http://almanazir.typepad.com/a.....the_m.html

@ Patricia

The reason your company sees little interest is because the retial industry, marketing were the initial drivers for data mining consumer based information, therefore they have a large historical repository to draw from.

Which does not mean you should’nt be collecting as much data as possible about your users (both passive data and opt-in data they volunteer), what it means is you need a good analyst to show you what to do with it to help optimize your business.

@Raghu

“c. If Flickr monetizes the information they collect from me - can I get something in return if I agree to share the information with them.”

Why should you get a piece of thier pie as a consumer of thier site, what I mean is your already using a free service, the usage data and both passive and active data belong to them.

Shouldnt your contribution as a community member and the fact that your contributing to making a product (that you use) better be enough of a return?

Every major multinational industry mines consumer data, some better than others, and some not at all. This is the data that ultimately defines what products you see, what people will pay, and subsequently defines advertising further down stream. Yes the advertisng engine makes more money as an industry, but it does not run without gas…..

The wonderful thing about Google, that is often forgotten, is that Larry and Sergy were data geeks and constructing an algorithim to spider the net was a means of achieveing this data.

The point that everyone missed last time around (except a very few) was that its not about eyeballs, its about value add data aquisition, and information, which subsequrntly drives the advertising.

In the brick and mortar world, the mechandise and advertising drive the data. On the web this relationship is completely reversed.

Only lemmings think otherwise.

This is the ultimate revenge for us math geeks

In data mining you look for overall trending, historical, geographic etc. as it realates to the product and its feature sets.

I know its very hard for people who operate advertising based websites and portals to grasp that sometimes (most of the time) there is significantly more money in the long term in a real product like aggregated data, coupled with good analysis.

The value of the data is not so much in historical trending (althouth it is valuable for performance measurements) but in predictive modeling

An excellent article on FreshDirect in today’s NY Times. See the end for how they leverage customer data in ways bricks & mortar do not.

Thanks for your inputs on how users have a choice to avoid sharing the information being used at Flickr. Not that I worry so much about somebody else knowing which camera I use - but may definitely may not want to reveal something else, so an option for me to control outflow of information is a must.

TH,

Fully agree with you that at a aggregate level nobody has any problem at all, but things become a little hazy of what is sharable and what is not when you drill a little deeper !

And yes the business options of a possibility like this are interesting to imagine, some possibilities

a. This reverse flow of information to the manufacturers can help them design their marketing campaigns - they can even customize it based on geographies
b. Based on the usage patterns over periods of time shops can design discount approaches
c. If Flickr monetizes the information they collect from me - can I get something in return if I agree to share the information with them.

… keep adding folks

Probably in the cheaper cameras first too. In a world where it’s getting harder for the point and click cameras to differentiate themselves from each other, mega pixels doesn’t seem to cut it with the consumer any more, things like wi-fi, publish from camera to web and GPS will start cropping up more and more.

Especially when you have sites like Flickr, Smugmug and Zoomr raising consumers interest in the topic and putting pressure on camera manufactures to provide.

Imagine the ability to geolocate and map certain facial characteristics or distribution of dog breeds or , a little down down the line, the ability to globally analyse the physical ageing process of a whole generation as never before.

Simply relying on people to take the time to geotag their photos on Flickr or Zoomr isnt the solution , we need cameras that know where they are at.

I do think this is a great use of data - and in this case, rather than charging for it, they are making a spiff when someone buys thru Yahoo shopping. I call it Genius 2.0.

Raw data is rarely useful for users, manufacturers or retailers, but when processed and cross-tabbed with something else might become very interesting indeed: how about make and model of camera vs. the ratings of the pictures or number of time viewed; or the above-mentioned geographical distribution of camera makes or types (phone cam, point/shoot, system)? Combined with the demographic etc. info that both the websites and the manufacturers have of their clientele, I see loads of potential for these stats as marketing tool - the other question is whether the users want all that profiling to be going on, and are they happy to provide their details to the pool.

the data that generates this list is pulled from exif information.

you can:

1] not include EXIF information in the files you upload to flickr

2] use the flickr setting to hide exif information on this page: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/privacy/

so i really don’t think privacy is at all an issue here and it shouldn’t push people away since providing the information to flickr is entirely optional with multiple way of hiding the data.