I'm researching and thinking back on Flickr to prepare for a panel I'm on at the Salzburg Global Seminar next week, Power in Whose Palm? The Digital Democratization of Photography. It's also very cold in Salzburg at the moment, which led me to recall this lovely thing, The Lorax projected into the Boston blizzard, by Brian Maffitt.
It's been fun to think about Flickr again. I'm enjoying remembering how stunning it was for us to recognize what we'd built as the Eyes of the World. Stewart blogged about it during the Paris riots in 2006 - the Parisians' photographs coming out of that unrest were intense and amazing - "most dramatically, Flickr gives you a window into things that you might otherwise never see, from the perspective of people that you might otherwise never encounter."