by Christina Pomoni

Created on: July 28, 2009

Launched in 2004 in Vancouver, Flickr is an online community platform that hosts more than 3.6 billion images as of June 2009. Being an advanced technology image and video hosting website, Flickr offers the opportunity to its millions of users to share their personal photos, tag them to denote their subject theme, organize them in sets, and store them with privacy controls that determine who can view the page. Upon submission, Flickr rates each photo based on its interestingness which is actually the number of times the photo is viewed, called a favorite from other users, e-mailed to friends and so on.

The acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo! in March 2005 made all data submitted subject to the US federal law. Moreover, the upload limits on free accounts increased from 20MB to 100MB per month, while Pro accounts were permitted unlimited uploads from 2GB that were originally introduced. Paid subscribers were allowed to upload videos of 90 seconds length and 150MB size, while free users could upload normal resolution videos. Finally, Flickr updated its services from beta to gamma alongside a design and structural renovate. Today, apart from English, Flickr is available in another eight languages, namely Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese (traditional), French, German, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.

All these changes are nothing more than signs of the times; as collaborative journalism is. Focusing on the aggregation of information from various non-affiliated sources to produce complete and newsworthy stories, collaborative journalism is implemented through the use of blogs, wikis and online forums. Although in the beginning, collaborative journalism has received a great deal of criticism, in the process people have realized that anyone with a certain sense of interaction and critical thinking could break a story to a larger audience or collaborate with other people to explore the hidden details of an interesting event.

Similarly, collaborative photojournalism focuses on the aggregation of photos from different photographers. Flickr uses slideshows that consist of public photos under one tag and are, in effect, a creation of the contributing photographers. This is a clear-cut form of aggregation, similar to collaborative journalism, which implies that the best photos, as voted by the Flickr community, appear first in the slideshow. Besides, as new photos are added to the stream, it continues to change classifying photos based on their interestingness.

Apparently, with the existence of Flickr, as it happens with any other social networking website, people are more inclined to document their experiences and share their photos on a Web stream. Besides, all the interaction taking place through the user comments, exchange of photos, and sharing of material cultivates community making Flickr a social networking website. Even more than that, Flickr is an excellent tool for photojournalists because it enables them to assembly a fascinating story in pieces easily, quickly and effectively.

On the other hand, Flickr has received a great deal of criticism as having promoted collaborative photojournalism. Advocates of collaborative photojournalism claim that it has been initiated long before Flickr through freelance photographers, who could sent their photos to a centralized editing service, where they were turned into books. In fact, this is true with the '24 Hours in ' book series. However, Flickr enabled a swifter delivery of photos to a broader audience after a thorough and systematic editorial review to ensure high quality content on the website.

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