How flickr helps us make sense of the world

Abstract

The advent of media-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube has drastically increased the volume of community-contributed multimedia resources available on the web. These collections have a previously unimagined depth and breadth, and have generated new opportunities - and new challenges - to multimedia research. How do we analyze, understand and extract patterns from these new collections? How can we use these unstructured, unrestricted community contributions of media (and annotation) to generate "knowledge".