Back in March (3/31 to be exact), I took a screenshot of the Flickr popular tags image map. Today I took another screenshot of this image map. I’ve included them below.

Obviously Flickr has grown a lot between March and December of 2005. To get a sense as to how much Flickr has grown, I generated some charts over at Amazon’s Alexa.

So what does all this traffic growth mean? To get a “feel” for how large Flickr has become, I then charted Flickr’s traffic vs. CNN.com’s — one of the most popular and “mainstream” sites (at least in the US).

Pretty impressive growth. I can’t say that Flickr is is anywhere near as “mainstream” as CNN, but clearly Flickr is very well know on the net — at least by the geeks. Here’s some random observations comparing March’s popular tags to December’s.

• The tags “moblog” and “cameraphone” have apparently lost some relative popularity (ie, size) from March to December.
• “geotagged” is not one of the popular tags in March, but is in December.
• “vancouver” (former home of Flickr) is now smaller in December.
• The months March, April, May, June and July are the only months I could find in December (I guess folks shoot more shots in these months?).

That’s just some quick observations. I’ll try to gin up some more later.