When 911 happened, most people hadn’t heard of bloggers or Wikipedia, there was no Feedster or Technorati, Google News did not exist*, there was no Flickr and people did not have camera phones.
These products and services are not a result of 911, but this was the event that created one facet of what is now an unshakable trend, real-time, ubiquitous, truly democratic media. The second phase of the web, where people could publish as easily as they could browse, was being born.
The thing that people used to laugh at when we pitched it originally while at Moreover, actually happened.
After the attacks last week in London, I thought that this would be the point where image sharing reached mainstream awareness for news gathering. Camera phones with ability to post via the web are more widespread than in the US and photo sharing has reached an inflection point.
In some ways this did happen, within a couple of hours, amateur pictures posted on the web were picked up by mainstream news services and there have been articles since pointing out the role of digital cameras and camera phones.
When I tried to create a real-time list of aggregated thumbnails of amateur news pictures, using Wists, I realized that things are still nascent.
I looked at over twenty photo sharing sites (some of which have far more users than Flickr) and other than a few images from moblogging sites in the UK the only site with images was Flickr and therefore there was little point in aggregating them.
In addition, the majority of the photos on Flickr were taken from people pointing their camera phone at television news. After the event, the most important images are those taken by CCT surveillance cameras.
None of this is that surprising, however, I’ll bet one thing – that Google develops something more like Flickr and less like Picassa at some point, cos Flickr clearly demonstrates the future of image sharing.
*The fact that other search engines such as Alta Vista had news search (through Moreover), largely prompted Google to develop a news product.