Tag Galaxy

Absolutely the cool Flickr visualization ever. Don’t click if you want to get anything else accomplished today.

So, what’s this say about my social life?

Via Thomas Hawk, a study on how to gain popularity on Flickr. The conclusions are nothing we didn’t know already – participation and reciprocity are the key – but their sampling caught my interest:

This base is made of the 50,000 more intensive users, where the intensity of a user was measured by taking the sum of the normalized ranks of a user on each of the functionalities. In this base, the average number of posted photos is 915 (with a maximum of 75,737), of contacts 181, of favorites 270 (received 307), of posted comments 775 (received 751).

My own stats, at the time I write this:

1,824 photos posted
10,480 photos faved
7,928 given

I can’t find totals for faves and comments received, but my 10 most faved and commented photos have 385 faves and 490 comments respectively.

Amazingly, till today I didn’t think of myself as that much of an outlier. But going by the numbers in the study, I’d be somewhere in the top .01% most active users.

Flickr Video… ugh

Flickr now has video.

Since they launched this feature, I’ve tried to find something to say about it here, but I’ve struggled to find the words for it. Articulating my feelings on the subject is difficult; in large part because there are real, strong feelings to contend with.

Video is not a “long photo” it’s not a “moving picture”, as Flickr described them. It’s an intrinsically and fundamentally different medium, which requires a completely different skill set to produce, as well as different equipment with a much steeper learning curve. It guarantees that it will drag down the average quality of the site, because there just isn’t the same base of “talented amateurs” for videography as there is for photography.

Video, by its very nature, by its very presence, whether one chooses to ignore it or not fundamentally changes the nature of the site. With the flick of a switch, Flickr changed from a place (the place) that photographers of all skill levels came to share and discuss photos and photography, to a place where people who don’t necessarily share any unifying interest come to share “items” (Flickr’s language). A worst case scenario is that video will bring with it the culture of Youtube; a wasteland of copyright violations and immature, idiotic comments.

It wasn’t all that long ago that this was explicitly the focus of the site – illustrations, graphic art, and screenshots were relegated to second class citizen status. They were filtered out of searches and kept off of explore. The message was clear: we can’t stop you from uploading these, but the site is for photos.

That this isn’t the case with video, and that they in fact went out of their way to ensure video would be treated no differently than photos, signals a very fundamental shift in the character of the site. Video took up unknowable man hours to develop, and yet more to maintain. These are development resources that could have been used to develop more photography-oriented features; but from here on out every new feature will have to balance the needs of the video content with the photos.

Most frustrating, perhaps, is the obtuseness of the staff in addressing community objections, at least as indicated by their actions and public comments. It seems unbelievable to me that given the very predictable uproar, they didn’t launch the feature with an ability to filter video out of our Flickr experience. I realize now that such a filter is the best I can hope for, I’ve seen politicians who give more direct answers, especially regarding the question of such a filter.

My pro account expires this coming November. I don’t see any reason not to continue using it until then. But this is the first time since joining the site that the question of whether I’ll renew it is in doubt.

Freezing!

Told ya it was cold.

This is actually a two frame panoramic, stitched for a wider view.

Exposure:1/250″
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 12mm

Tall and Skinny

I have a love/hate relationship with Flickr’s Explore.

On the one hand, it’s a flawed metric for quality. It has a pretty strong bias towards flowers, leaves, dogs/cats, sunsets, people’s feet, long exposures shot of the shore and surf, and the occasional cute wild animal for good measure. This is because at its heart it’s community driven, and people, in general, like these subjects. And in fairness, those photos in Explore do tend to be very good on a technical level, and are usually better than just straight-on shots of these subjects.

But they’re photography cliches, and the most interesting, creative, and original stuff, in my own stream and in that of other photographers, rarely seems to get there. And mine that have been in Explore aren’t necessarily the ones I consider my very best. Therefore, getting into Explore isn’t the be all and end all judgment of whether you have a good shot on your hands.

On the other hand though, it’s recognition – it’s kind of nice to be selected among the top 500 considering that the site gets around 3,000 uploads per minute. And so you get a little zing of pride when you check Scout and find another one has been there, even though you know it’s relatively meaningless and random…

This is a wide angle shot of a small tree from a low perspective. For the last couple of days, it’s hovered around #200 in Explore for Feb 22, 2008.

Exposure: 1/400″
Aperture: f/10
Focal Length: 13mm