The wisdom of social multimedia: Using Flickr for prediction and forecast

Social multimedia hosting and sharing websites, such as Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, Picasa, ImageShack and Photobucket, are increasingly popular around the globe. A major trend in the current studies on social multimedia is using the social media sites as a source of huge amount of labeled data for solving large scale computer science problems in computer vision, data mining and multimedia. In this paper, we take a new path to explore the global trends and sentiments that can be drawn by analyzing the sharing patterns of uploaded and downloaded social multimedia. In a sense, each time an image or video is uploaded or viewed, it constitutes an implicit vote for (or against) the subject of the image. This vote carries along with it a rich set of associated data including time and (often) location information. By aggregating such votes across millions of Internet users, we reveal the wisdom that is embedded in social multimedia sites for social science applications such as politics, economics, and marketing. We believe that our work opens a brand new arena for the multimedia research community with a potentially big impact on society and social sciences.