People interested in the future of Commons as a platform should take a look at what's been happening with Flickr and astronomy photos.
1) The Royal Observatory ran a contest for "Astronomy Photographer of the Year" on Flickr. This was a really sophisticated website that used Flickr as a backend.
2) The Blind Astrometry Server is a bot that automatically figures out where astronomical images are in the sky, and tags them appropriately.
In both cases, the Flickr staff weren't even aware these things were going on, for quite a while.
Anyway, I was reminded of all this today since someone sent me a link to the Royal Observatory's retrospective on the whole thing:
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/romeo/romeo.html
And here's two blog posts I wrote for Flickr some time ago:
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/02/18/found-in-space/
http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/03/20/tags-in-space/
In my view there isn't anything that Flickr is doing which Commons couldn't be doing. And as much as I have faith in the Flickr team, I have doubts about whether Yahoo is the right place, long term, for the world to be relying on for such resources.
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
In my view there isn't anything that Flickr is doing which Commons couldn't be doing. And as much as I have faith in the Flickr team, I have doubts about whether Yahoo is the right place, long term, for the world to be relying on for such resources.
Who'd be better? Some site like woophy.com that can't even manage to bring in $800 a month to pay for it's servers? Panoramio, because it's got a rich (for now) sugar daddy? How about some academic institution that gets a grant to start something, but not to finish it?
The whole point of Flickr is that people can do things with it without talking to the Flickr staff. You should try working in the "enterprise software" world where you can spend weeks and weeks of the time of 20 people on both sides of the table trying to make a sale, only to have the buyer decide that it's going to put off the decision for another year. Then you leave the meeting, go back to do some productive (you think) coding and find that instead you've got to talk to people on the phone for six hours to renew the license of some software you're using.
I don't think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people think. YHOO is in the black financially; people put it down because their user base is going sideways, and not growing explosively like Facebook. It looks bad when you compare it to two rivals: Google, which has done much better in search and monetizing search and Facebook, which has pioneered the "social network" revolution that makes portals like Yahoo look quaint. That said, Yahoo has a number of world-leading properties such as Yahoo Finance and Flickr.
Now, Yahoo might one day get acquired, maybe even broken apart, but it's just as possible that Microsoft or Google will be on the rocks 10 years from now too.
It's been pointed out to me that this is the first time I've posted on Commons-L, so some introduction is in order.
I'm working on Multimedia Usability at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm a recent hire, working by the graces of a grant from the Ford Foundation. In the past I've worked for sites like Flickr and Upcoming.org.
My main focus right now, along with Guillaume Paumier, is improving the upload experience for Commons users. We're getting close to a prototype that the rest of you can try, pretty soon.
On freenode IRC I'm 'flipzagging', but 'neilk' on pretty much every other way, including User:NeilK on most wikis and my email address.
On 03/16/2010 11:24 AM, Paul Houle wrote:
Who'd be better? [...]
I don't dispute anything you say, but I was just suggesting that Wikimedia Commons could also be a good a platform.
In some ways Commons should be even better for scientific work, since items are more "personal" by default at Flickr, and if one wants to collaborate one has to use workarounds or specifically grant permission. On Wikimedia projects there is more of a culture around collaboration by default, and contributing to general knowledge.
I don't think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people think.
It wasn't an opinion on Yahoo's continued financial health. They're just fundamentally not in the business of public knowledge.
Even if we could trust Yahoo to be in the image-metadata game forever, Flickr photos are only accessible as long as the owner is still paying. In 10 years, Flickr will be as outdated as Geocities, and even the content owners will have moved on. All those photos available on the astronomy groups today will be disappearing, one by one.
At best, the very few photos which are CC-licensed can be copied elsewhere. (It's unclear to me whether metadata like the astrotags is also CC-licensed.)
FYI, as mentioned above, I used to work at Flickr and had a stint in the rest of Yahoo as well. Those blog posts of mine that I linked to were on the Flickr developer blog.
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
I don't dispute anything you say, but I was just suggesting that Wikimedia Commons could also be a good a platform.
In some ways Commons should be even better for scientific work, since items are more "personal" by default at Flickr, and if one wants to collaborate one has to use workarounds or specifically grant permission. On Wikimedia projects there is more of a culture around collaboration by default, and contributing to general knowledge.
If it becomes a good platform, yes. It's got to become a bit more readerly than just a "private staging area for wikipedia content", which it is perceived as today.
There's the issue of making it easy to find things, but also a more fundamental issue of inclusionism vs. exclusionism. You can get away with a weaker navigation interface if you've got more content, since some of it is going to have passable metadata, if only by accident.
Personally, I participate in Wikipedia very little because of exclusionism. I'll certainly delete a spam link here, correct a typo there, or correct a fact, but I'm not going to invest hours and hours of my life into writing stuff that somebody can delete because it's "not notable."
I think Flickr is successful as a photo repository precisely because it's full of junk. I upload maybe 10% of the shots I take into Flickr. Many of these shots are only of interest to me, my friends, and family, but I also took a better shot of the capitol building than the one that the NY Times used today (and paid an arm and a leg to Getty for the privilege) If I knew that my images could be deleted by somebody, I wouldn't upload any at all (I might not even ~take~ any.)
Now, since people have uploaded millions and millions of "personal" images, it's possible to come in and select the good ones. This kind of after-the-fact curation is much more practical than hoping that people are going to show up at your stone soup party.
I don't think that things are, objectively, bad at Yahoo as people think.
It wasn't an opinion on Yahoo's continued financial health. They're just fundamentally not in the business of public knowledge.
Based on my experience in the "digital library" field, I've got little faith in any non-profit web publishing venture. For instance, you're working on some grant that's going to expire. I worked at a library that did over 100 "digital library" projects, and thought that they were doing financially well for a while It took a while to realize that a one-time $50,000 grant was going to really cost them $5,000 a year in annual costs forever... And that no funding agency whatsoever was interested in supporting the long-term cost of such projects.
In an extreme example, I worked for a service that saves readers $500 million a year in journal subscription costs but that has struggled to find any funding source to pay a meager $250,000 /year budget. People celebrate this service, but few realize how close it's come to destruction. In the meantime, a group of people in the same building were getting $2M/year to develop a web site that never developed an audience.
Businesses in the for-profit sector seem to systematically eliminate non-profits on the web. The root cause of this is that for-profit businesses stand to make a profit when the offer a better service to their users. They've got an incentive to make things 2% better because that means they can make 2% more money... The people involved get a bonus, the shareholders get some, everybody is happy. Make things 2% better this week, and 1% better this week systematically, and soon you're hundreds and hundreds of times better than a niggardly non-profit that's ruled over by somebody who's leading it because they're an expert in "subject X" or "subject Y" which could be any subject at all, so long as it isn't about making web sites or giving users a good experience
Yes, wikimedia is a counterexample, but it's really the only one. It would be interesting to understand why it's succeeded in a space where everything else has failed.
Even if we could trust Yahoo to be in the image-metadata game forever, Flickr photos are only accessible as long as the owner is still paying. In 10 years, Flickr will be as outdated as Geocities, and even the content owners will have moved on. All those photos available on the astronomy groups today will be disappearing, one by one.
My understanding is that they don't take your photos down when you quit paying; "PRO" membership in flickr increases your upload quota, but discontinuing it has no effect on what you've already uploaded.
It's no so clear what will replace Flickr and when it will happen. It's hard to displace entrenched companies in two-sided markets. Any replacement is going to need to be radically better than Flickr, not just 10% better.
At best, the very few photos which are CC-licensed can be copied elsewhere. (It's unclear to me whether metadata like the astrotags is also CC-licensed.)
Personally this is what I do.
This reminds me of a discussion I had with Piotrus along similar lines a few months back: http://prokonsul.blogspot.com/2009/06/flickr-vs-wikimedia-commons-why-flickr...
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
My understanding is that they don't take your photos down when you quit paying; "PRO" membership in flickr increases your upload quota, but discontinuing it has no effect on what you've already uploaded.
That's not quite true. Flickr doesn't delete your photos, but only the 200 most recent are available (either to you or to the public) unless you resume paying, and even the 200 are only available at a maximum resolution of (I think) 1024 pixels to a side.
For what it's worth, I love Flickr and happily pay my yearly fee, but I agree with Neil that Commons can and should be the go-to platform for a lot of what currently happens on Flickr, like the awesome astrometry.net project. In many cases, the value in Flickr as a platform for civic-minded projects is as much the type of community it has as the technology; Flickr is a photo playground, and a lot of its community aspects are rooted in the that playground feeling. But Commons could do a lot more to emulate some of the community-attracting features of Flickr and give users more ways to play and interact (with each other and with the photos). And for a lot of other worthwhile projects (like astrometry) just the technology would be enough, even without a more Flickr-like community.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)
Sage Ross wrote:
For what it's worth, I love Flickr and happily pay my yearly fee, but I agree with Neil that Commons can and should be the go-to platform for a lot of what currently happens on Flickr, like the awesome astrometry.net project. In many cases, the value in Flickr as a platform for civic-minded projects is as much the type of community it has as the technology; Flickr is a photo playground, and a lot of its community aspects are rooted in the that playground feeling. But Commons could do a lot more to emulate some of the community-attracting features of Flickr and give users more ways to play and interact (with each other and with the photos). And for a lot of other worthwhile projects (like astrometry) just the technology would be enough, even without a more Flickr-like community.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)
What would you say if I uploaded a bunch of pictures of my son to Wikipedia Commons? Would they be deleted? For me there's a lot of value of Flickr being a space I can upload photographs that I choose, rather than needing to wonder if "it likely to be useful to a Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ project?" I'd rather give my $25 a year to Flickr than face the prospect of arguing about the inclusion of my photos.
There's a guy on Flickr who appears to have photographed every culvert pipe on Staten Island. Is this "notable?" Is this guy a nut or is he a world expert on urban hydrology? Different people could have different opinions.
There's also no clear line between "pictures of our kids" and "pictures that document notable things"... For instance, this is my favorite photo of the Unisphere:
http://ny-pictures.com/nyc/photo/picture/13176/girl_poses_picture_unisphere_...
It's definitely somebody's vacation photo, and it could be better composed than it is, but I like the way that a person in the scene adds life and scale.
Personally I think the only way you get good photographs is by selection out of a large pool of bad and mediocre photographs. Much like professional sports teams recruit from college teams which recruit from high school teams, which in turn recruit from youth leagues, it takes multiple steps of selection and refinement.
A "user interface" isn't just something that's painted on, it really reflects the intention that a system has: Flickr is designed to be a "fun photo playground" and it does that admirably, better than anybody else. There are a lot of great photos on flickr that just don't fit in the "useful" mode
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sakura-kame/4446997021/
but these photos get a strong community reaction... And personally, I've found participating in the community forums on Flickr has pushed me to grow as a photographer.
If Wikipedia Commons were to get too much Flickr envy, it might not do a good job at what it's doing now.
for a lot of what currently happens on Flickr, like the awesome astrometry.net project. In many cases, the value in Flickr as a
FWIW I worked on an "astrometry bot" a few months ago, and was in contact with the developers. Back then it turned out not to make a whole lot of sense, as our collection of astronomy pictures was small, and the ones we had showed mostly very narrow portions of the sky. This makes it necessary to use databases with very large magnitudes, i.e. a large number of reference stars. making the calculations very slow and memory consuming (too much for the already strained toolserver).
I might revisit this project is a while if a real need develops.
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
What would you say if I uploaded a bunch of pictures of my son to Wikipedia Commons? Would they be deleted? For me there's a lot of value of Flickr being a space I can upload photographs that I choose, rather than needing to wonder if "it likely to be useful to a Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ project?" I'd rather give my $25 a year to Flickr than face the prospect of arguing about the inclusion of my photos.
I'm not disagreeing; that's why I pay for Flickr. I don't think Commons can or should try to do *everything* Flickr does, but within the scope of Commons, there's still room to add a lot of the fun aspects of Flickr.
-Sage
On 22 March 2010 21:01, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.comragesoss%2Bwikipedia@gmail.com
wrote:
On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com wrote:
What would you say if I uploaded a bunch of pictures of my son to Wikipedia Commons? Would they be deleted? For me there's a lot of value of Flickr being a space I can upload photographs that I choose, rather than needing to wonder if "it likely to be useful to a Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ project?" I'd rather give my $25 a year to Flickr than face the prospect of arguing about the inclusion of my photos.
I'm not disagreeing; that's why I pay for Flickr. I don't think Commons can or should try to do *everything* Flickr does, but within the scope of Commons, there's still room to add a lot of the fun aspects of Flickr.
I must agree with Sage that whilst Wikimedia Commons and Flickr are similar they are not the same animal. We could certainly learn from them and incorporate many of their tools/features but it's not a zero-sum-game between the two projects.
However, I do see much greater competition between Wikimedia Commons and Flickr *Commons* - Flickr's project for the GLAM sector. For those interested, I wrote a blogpost in January about why Wikimedia Commons was a good thing for GLAMs (arguments you'd all be familiar with) and in response the Sydney Powerhouse Museum wrote this detailed and enlightening reply in defense of Flickr Commons: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2010/01/25/why-flickr-comm...
For summary, the key reasons listed in that post were:
*1. Context matters a lot.*
*2. User experience and community*
*3. Managing that community*
*4. A sense of content control*
*5. Statistics*
*Now, whilst we can't do a whole lot about number 4, we can improve a lot on numbers 2 and 5, for example. *
*-Liam [[witty lama]] *
wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata
-Sage
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