With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system.

Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers.

Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it.

It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it.
Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter.

Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. Flickr helped pioneer “Web 2.0″, and personal data ownership is a key piece of that vision. Just because the wider public hasn’t caught on yet to all the nuances around data access, data privacy, data ownership, and data fidelity, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be embarrassed to be failing to deliver a quality product.

Data access, doing it right the Flickr way.

2.3 million in one month!

We generally try do the dumbest thing that will work first. And that’s usually as far as we get.

There’s an elegance to dumb solutions.

This morning I was interviewed by Phil Mercer on BBC Radio Oxford about the exhibition. My first ever radio interview.

For your pleasure (and my cringing) here I am in all my stumbling glory (10Mb MP3)

I blame the fact that it was just after 8am and there was a lot of coffee kicking around my system.

At least I remembered not to swear!

Now Tom Taylor has built a tool which allows you to visualise the boundaries of these neighbourhoods and see how Flickr views your part of the world.

Cool stuff.