Can Flickr be the centre of your web presence

Something we started using last year, as part of the Birmingham City University web presence, was Flickr, the highly popular photo uploading and storage site owned by Yahoo! We have used it for photos of the campus buildings, photos of current promotions and of course news worthy photos such as the award ceremonies. I really like Flickr, so much so that i started using it myself and very quickly it became the centre of my own web presence. I run a couple of news blogs and i use Flickr to create badges of relevant images, scans, illustrations et cetera.

So can Flickr become the centre of the Birmingham City University web presence too? It is probably more difficult for a university site as university information tends to be mostly text based. However rich use of imagery can be of great assistance to add real value to the existing text. But that can be done anyway, what makes Flickr special? Because if you have your images on Flickr then they are on what must be one of the world's busiest websites (if not for direct visits to the homepage), part of one of the biggest internet companies, and searchable by all. You can also add links to your own site in the photo description and also geotag the photograph to put it on a Yahoo! map. Thus you are adding so much extra valuable information and options for people to come to your website to what was just a photograph.


A photo i took of Margaret Street, click on it to go to the Flickr site and see an example of how you can add extra value to the photograph.

We're not the only ones using Flickr, this US Coast Guard news site uses it and also this Taiwanese clothes auction site uses it for photos of their wares (don't ask). However its interesting that in the latter case no effort has been made to add the extra value to the photograph which is key to getting the best out of Flickr. To find the site this photo belonged to for example i had to go to the Flickr account owner's profile. The Coast Guard Flickr doesn't even include a link!

It would be interesting to use Flickr for all image hosting on a future BCU website, all images could have extra meta information added and be geotagged. I have already used Flickr hosted images to illustrate some news stories but you could, for example, host an image illustrating a Radiography course on Flickr, including some basic course information a geotag and a link back to the BCU site in the image details. Someone on the Flickr site does a search for "radiography" and maybe you might have just found a new potential student...