One of the blogs I read quite regularly is The Flickr Blog, which is a companion weblog to the main Flickr site. One of the interesting recent posts came partly out of their move to being part of Yahoo!, and how they now had to in some eyes waste time trying to articulate the vision behind Flickr for the wider organisation. Whilst you could describe what it does, i.e. allows people to store their pictures online, that doesn’t say it all, it’s also not right to look at it as some sort of vast stock photo library. You can throw terms around like Web 2.0 or Social Computing, but none of these give the kind of big corporate vision type description that was needed.

What they came up with was ‘The Eyes of the World‘ – which I think does do a good job of summing it up.

For the purposes of the article, they looked at some of the big events recently that have been captured on Flickr. In the same way as with the London Bombings, and Buncefield one of the best places to find images of the events has been on Flickr. Take for example this incredible picture from the recent riots in France posted by Hugo*, which really has to be viewed large. The article also highlights the recent demonstrations in Blelarus which were largely ignored by the local state controlled media.

However it’s not all big events. Many people also share events that on an international scale are small, but in many ways just as important. The The Flickr Blog highlighted this with their post yesterday called ‘A daughter is born and a father is dying‘ which highlights two of the deeply personal pictures that people choose to share with the rest of the community on Flickr. It very much goes to back up their description as the ‘Eyes of the World’.