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 Why Flickr? Flickr was selected to exemplify online collaborative visual communities in this project based on longevity, image count and widening influence. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com ) was launched in 2004 and was acquired by Yahoo Corp in 2005. The original purpose of the site was to allow members to post photos online and then designate them as either public or private . By March of 2005, more than 80 percent of the 5.5 million photos were public (Stone 2005). The ground-breaking aspect of Flickr which began attracting visual artists to the community in 2006 was its early adoption of folksonomy tagging. Images were classified by user-selected labels ("tags") which allowed all images sharing that particular tag to be located and explored as a group. Millions of images were indexed by their creators, forming a colloquial social network of visual art. Members did not adhere to any designated vocabulary in assigning tags, but viewed other images already in the collection and adapted existing tags or created new ones to suit the occasion. Flickr tagging became "do-it-yourself" electronic collaboration. |