…welcome to Elías’ blog!

That’s right, the Flickr deadline (June 1st) for downloading the “stats” from late 2007 to April 2010 is only 4 days away  …so I guess that counts as bad news.  So what’s the good news? well, with the recent changes in the Flickr Stats API, some developers have taken the initiative to create interesting data-presentation for the flickr stats.  For instance, flickrstats lets users with a Pro account process their historical referrer data and visualize it in a very interactive and graphic interface –a la Google Analytics.   I think this is another example of a great application that was possible by combining the “flexibility” from flickr and the “creativity” from those developers out there.

There is a video (demo) available here -and if things go the way they’re supposed to, once you’ve authenticated your flickr account at http://stats.vispillo.org/ in minutes you could get a nice image like this one:

It seems like the pie charts are displaying only the top 10 results -and at this point, I’m not sure if there is a way to change/customize that, …but they do have an option for viewing a more complete list of all the referrers and search terms at the very bottom of that initial page; additionally, users can drag/select specific time periods and the graphs get updated immediately -very cool!  This is definitely a very nice complement for reporting flickr stats …and it’ll probably continue to get better; in the future, a couple of items in a “wish list” will probably include:

• percentages or sub-totals on the pie charts
• text fields or a calendar for entering date ranges
• options for exporting reports to other formats -e.g. PDF, XML, etc?

Well, maybe that’s too much to ask for -at least now, but again, I think (hope) this is just the beginning of some great developments on the flickr stats data! …it’d be nice to have a service like this as part of the default services in Flickr, we’ll wait and see!

Keeping track of the number of visitors to a site -or collecting data about how these visitors found your site- can be useful for several reasons: evaluating, reporting, planning etc.  After uploading two image collections into flickr -January 2009-, I’ve been checking/comparing two web-stats tools -Google Analytics (GA) for the local CONTENTdm collections and Flickr Stats (FS) for the new flickr collection.

At first, flickr seemed to be the “winner” especially with the level of details (e.g. views, comments, referrers, keywords) provided for individual images.  At that time, there was also a way to view the “all time” stats.  In March, however, flickr made a couple of changes to the stats page.  They added the “so far today” feature which could be useful but they disabled the “all time” stats.  You can read some details and discussion on this page.

…being positive, I hope to see this feature -restored- in the future, because it lets users see/analyze/make decisions based on the accumulated stats.  Even better, FS should let users specify a range of time–just as GA does.

For instance, think about this hypothetical example:

[ view larger image ]

While we cannot really compare these two tools, in the long-term, flickr users will probably appreciate some other enhancements -generate a PDF report, visitors’ location, etc.  After all, FS is part of the $25 annual fee for the pro accounts.

In the meantime, don’t get disappointed …we can still do something:
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/refs/thisweek/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/refs/lastweek/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/refs/threeweeksago/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/allphotos/thisweek/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/allphotos/today/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/YYYY-MM-DD/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/YYYY-MM-DD/refs/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/YYYY-MM-DD/allphotos/