[Commons-l] Photography platforms, case study: Flickr and astronomy

[Neil Kandalgaonkar]

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     <neilk at wikimedia.org>