Thursday, March 31, 2005

Flickr Domination



Regular reader of this site will have noticed that it’s been quite light on postings recently. There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, because Blogger has been such a git to post to these last few weeks, even more so than usual, and secondly because I’ve been sucked into the Flickr thing, big time.

I’ve uploaded 600-700 photos in the last few days and there’s plenty more where that came from. Unlike many of the newbies just cutting their photographically obsessed teeth on Flickr, I’ve been doing this thing for a long time now. The temptation to swamp certain themed groups on Flickr with selections from my capacious archive and crush my competitors like the puny mites they are is strong.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha!

… Ha!

I spent a couple of hours chatting with, mostly to, a guy called Kris Cohen yesterday. He’s a researcher at the University of Surrey doing work on photography and the Internet and how they impact on each other culturally, particularly as a result of the impressive take-up of digital photography and photo sharing sites. Our chat has set-off all sorts of trains of thought which I’ll probably write-up at some point. I was particularly interested by Kris’ plan to interview a fair number of photobloggers and ‘consumers’ of photoblogs, mostly in and around London. The thought that he will be meeting people who I only know through their Internet output is intriguing. Faces to usernames. Voices to pictures.


It will also be interesting to hear Kris’ observations and conclusions about the nature of this group of people at the end of the process. If there’s one thing the Internet is brilliant at it’s reminding you that you are not as individual as you would like to believe and that there are people out there, maybe not that far away, doing exactly the same thing as you for similar reasons. Maybe Kris could hold a party at the end of the process and we could all meet and stare suspiciously at each other over our Baby Chams.

Now there’s a scary thought.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey if you like the flickr stuff you should check out my site!

Stef said...

Mmmmmmm ....