At the recent WWW2009 Conference, a group from Cornell University presented a paper that investigated roughly 35million geotagged photos available on Flickr and showed an analysis based on text tags, image data, and geospacial data to reveal geographic and visual information about the world.
For instance, their findings show that the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, which opened in May 2006, is more popular than many other well-known tourist sites such as St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Washington Monument in the US capital.
The paper is available as a PDF for your viewing pleasure.
Mapping the World’s Photos: Extensive Flickr Photo Analysis – information aesthetics.
@Maitri
I’m sure what you describe is a major point of contention, more than being a more popular tourist site, it’s a more popular “geek-centric” tourist site.
But I think they’re attempting to counter the lack of geotag data with the text tags & basic image recognition/similarity checks. However, the fact that Flickr isn’t really a good metric of visitors still holds.
I don’t think geotagged photos are an accurate metric of visitors.If I’d taken a picture of the Washington Monument and NOT geotagged it, it would not have appeared in this study, right? What if there are indeed more visitors to these places than the 5th Ave Apple Store and the nerds who took pictures at the Apple Store simply have their geotagging feature set to On and/or post their pictures to Flickr more than the others do?