Flickr has convinced me that a really well-designed photo-sharing site (and I mean really well-designed) plus the right community plus my having the right reasons to take a lot of pictures and organize them can lead one to start creating and sharing great big collections of images. First of all, they were images that I found useful for myself. Since I've already made the effort to make the pictures useful to myself in a structure that makes it easy to share with others, I've become very open to sharing my work with others -- since it's so little extra work. There's a lot to learn from the Flickr folks:
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they manage to focus on a particular data type: digital photographs
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they built a system that is open to remix
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they manage to get the "cool kids" to play there
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they did a great job at building an online community
It is conceivable to try to build a build a scholarly Flickr for Berkeley, but that's a tall challenge for a lot of reasons. (You can see that Flickr's competitors haven't done it.)
