Justin hips me to this neat page on Flickr called Camera Finder. All kinds of data about what cameras the Flickr community uses. I suspect a lot of this info is gathered by EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data. Its attached to jpegs and tiffs created by most modern digital cameras. Its then uploaded by Flickr users with all those great pics.

It appears Flickr has mined this meta data and turned it into usage graphs. On the same page are groups of photos taken by specific cameras sorted by interestingness. Included are pictures of the cameras and prices. Interesting sales idea. I’m sure this is only the tip of the knowledge iceberg.

A friend was recently searching for a new digital camera. I was trying to adviser her on which one to get. One of my suggestions was to “try before you buy”. Look at the results of the camera before you spend the $. Well now on Flickr you can look at pictures of different cameras and even see the settings they used to get the results. A pretty good consumer educational resource.

Its just these kind of Web 2.0 sales opportunities that result from data mining that business people are investing in. I guess you could call them advanced referrals.