Flickr does market research? Yep! The Camera Finder Launches

Flickr, the online photo site which is big with the tech kiddies, is now doing some market research. They call the site, Camera Finder. I call this genius 2.0. Use the data you have. Sometimes you can sell it, sometimes you can use it to help consumers make better choices. Here, Flickr does both because if you buy a cam through Yahoo Shopping, they get paid.

This is a perfect example of a company using data properly. When people upload images, most times that image comes along with the camera brand and model. And from that data, Flickr can publish reports on which cameras are used most often.

The information is posted on Flickr's camera page. From their page:

About these graphs
These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.

The graphs are "normalized", which is a fancy way of saying that they automatically correct for the fact that more people join Flickr each day: the graph moving up or down indicates a change in the camera's popularity relative to all other cameras used by Flickr members.

The graphs are only accurate to the extent that we can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo (about 2/3rds of the time). That is not usually possible with cameraphone photos and cameraphones are therefore under-represented.

If I have one small issue, it is that the main camera they display the specs on is not one of the cameras in the graph. Show me the best man, just the best!