[Sigia-l] Commercial power of metadata

[Jared M. Spool]

On Nov 22, 2006, at 2:02 AM, Ziya Oz wrote:

> When you want to see cute pictures of flowers and dogs you go to  
> Flickr.com
> When you want to see a price comparison for buying a digital camera  
> you go
> to online comparators like PriceGrabber.com.
>
> The former was designed for social sharing of photographic moments,  
> the
> latter for tabular drilldown of purchasing options.
>
> And yet, secondary metadata that, in many cases, may not even be  
> obvious to
> its providers can propel an aggregating site like Flickr.com to offer
> priceless commercial information, which at first seems so out of their
> original purpose:
>
> <http://www.flickr.com/cameras/>

I'm suspecting this could be very popular amongst camera purchasers.

In our studies of people shopping for digital cameras, there's a real  
gap between the tool they are buying (the camera) and the result it  
produces (the picture). We observed that people don't really want to  
buy a camera, they want to buy the pictures. Yet, few of the camera  
purchasing services help you understand what kinds of pictures a  
given camera produces. This makes shopping for a camera more  
frustrating than it should be.

I think Flickr/Yahoo! has a opportunity to bridge this gap in an  
interesting way. Can't wait to see how well they do that.

Jared


Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jspool at uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com  Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks