The Friendly Face of Ubiquitous Surveillance
LogicCamera.com published a list of the 10 most frequently used cameras on Flickr, which I find sort of fascinating. It’s a fantastic little side-effect of the age of smart gadgets and the so-called information age.
Now that all of the electronic doodads we carry about with us are smart enough to know things about themselves and their surroundings, it’s producing this huge pile of aggregate information which turns out to be very interesting.
There’s such an overwhelming amount of this data being produced that it’s (probably) not really feasible or helpful to look at a single person’s data footprint, but taken all together it can be helpful to individuals.
Taking this instance, say you wanted to buy a new camera. Previously, all you’d have had to go on was the marketing materials from the manufacturers themselves, sales figures, some sporadic ‘professional’ reviews written by people who probably don’t have the same perspective as you on camera usage, and some ‘user’ reviews which generally surface on websites and generally make me suspicious that they’ve been planted by the manufacturers. Now, using collected data like this, you can see not only the raw sales numbers of a particular camera, but also how often people used that camera after buying it.
That’s a really useful distinction. People only keep using something if they’re at least reasonably satisfied with it. The results filter out cameras which sold a lot based on hype but turned out to not actually be very good. It’s like having a giant hive mind telling you which things are actually worth your money.
For the record, their list is:
1. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT
2. NIKON D50
3. Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL
4. Canon EOS 20D
5. NIKON D70
6. NIKON D70s
7. Canon PowerShot S2 IS
8. Canon EOS 30D
9. Sony CYBERSHOT
10. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL
although they do point out that ‘Sony CYBERSHOT’ is a generic name that most Sony cameras put in their EXIF data, and it’s likely that the figures for this model mostly represent cameraphones.
(Random Note: In February, I posted about Flickr passing the ‘100 million photos uploaded’ mark. Now, at the end of September, it’s passed quarter of a billion)