Comparing Flickr Popular Tags — March 2005 vs. December 2005
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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.
December 24th, 2005 at 10:24 am
Whoops, deleted some real comments while moderating. This one from randomtruth:
Follow up… occured to me that the latency is likely due to slowness in upload times. I.e., people take pictures in summer but don’t upload them until fall, so the gaussian distribution that wraps a tag will peak months later than the seasonal event./
December 24th, 2005 at 10:28 am
Random,
How about this? Flickr users don’t know about the fancy Flash application where you can group photos by date (or they don’t like the application), so they are using tags to group by month… and that this application of tags is relatively new.
December 24th, 2005 at 10:30 am
READ ME FIRST!
Man, totally screwed up this thread. Here is Random’s original post.
“Cool comparison. Looks like there’s some latency to popularity. Note that in March there’s tags for “xmas” and “christmas” but by December the tag for “xmas” is gone and the “christmas” tag is smaller (less popular). The reverse is seen for the tag “summer” - it’s more popular in December. Think your observation of the month names in the December also supports this latency idea.”