The Gates

After reading about The Gates - the new art installation project in New York's Central Park by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (the same pair that famously wrapped a chain of islands off the coast of Florida) in today's Observer - I thought it would be interesting to see what photos Flickr yielded on the subject. Searching on the tag "the gates" returned 859 photos, most of which appeared to refer to the Central Park installation. More proof that, like Google, Amazon and eBay, Flickr has entered the platform business - in this case by providing an online image bank in the same vein as Getty Images or Corbis. In contrast to those, Flickr is free - and photo metadata is of the decentralised 'folksonomy' variety (and, in many cases, all the better for it.) Best of all, because Flickr is a piece of social software, it is immediately responsive to current news (I wonder how many photos of The Gates you'd find in the Getty Images catalogue.) Flickr could take their business in multiple directions now - a payment layer for the buying and selling of photos would be interesting, along with a rating system (I don't really want to see 859 photos of The Gates, but show me the best ones - all those with a five-star rating.) Be interesting to see if, in the long term, Flickr can disrupt traditional image bank businesses; if blogging is the new journalism, maybe Flickr is the new current affairs photo library? How long, I wonder, before we see Flickr providing a photo syndication service to news agencies, and 'amateur' photos appearing alongside professional articles in future copies of The Observer?

Posted by monoman at 01:29 PM on February 13, 2005