In previous blog posts, I’ve documented the number of photos on Flickr which were released under a Creative Commons license (post one, post two). For the past year, I’ve grabbed the Flickr Creative Commons page nightly, which lists how many photos are available under each license.

The total number today is over 32 million which is just incredible. A few days ago, I compiled all the data and graphed the growth. Click the graph for a larger version.

Once I had cleaned the data up, I uploaded the data to Swivel.com to see if it could produce nicer graphs than Excel. Turns out it didn’t. In fact, I found the interface confusing… it automatically created graphs for each individual column (license) and then created a combined graph based on percentage which made no sense. I ended up ditching Swivel, not really realizing uploaded swivel data can be remixed easily by other users.

Then things sort of took off on their own… which is both amazing and frustrating at the same time. Brian Mulloy, the CEO and Co-founder of Swivel, created a useful graph of the data on Swivel (much like the one I made above). That got a bunch of views on Swivel… and the graph ended up on the front page of the Creative Commons website. It goes to show you just how incredible collaboration among people on the Internet is. Even when you don’t intend to participate in collaboration it still happens. Next time, I’ll get my act together and actually blog about what I’m up to before my data starts to spread.

Here’s the data in tab delimited form. And here it is on Google Spreadsheet. Spread it freely.

Update: I just noticed that the collaborative path this data took was blogged on the Swivel blog as well.