kip/bot/blog

A friend in Facebook has an album called “pick me ups”:

I wish this were bigger on Facebook, because it’s a great way to help clients and others understand the varied uses of photo-sharing and having personal information on the web. This is an album full of great pictures of friends in very happy states, nieces and nephews, a few outdoor shots. From the title, she’s put them there so that she can browse through her pictures for a little emotional lift.

I’m sure meta is the wrong word, but there’s something meta-seeming about the title itself. It’s originally for her own consumption, a way to have her favorite pictures readily available, but there’s a willingness to share. It might be even stronger, that there’s an indifference to an audience — I will build it and don’t care if anyone comes, cuz I built it for me. That might be the reason for lower-case in the title.

My flickr photostream is kind of a mess in that sense. I put up pictures I want people to see, I put up images that amuse me and which I hope will amuse others, sometimes I use it as a note-taking device (a handyman sign on a light pole where the little number strips at the bottom are all taken away). I post a lot of screengrabs and scans there, cuz I want them for future reference.

Among marketers, the emphasis on audience size is still the first filter for any understanding of an internet experience. There are still concerns about quality of the audience, but size is a gating factor.

This emphasis on size of audience misses the complex relationship internet users have with their “audiences”. We’re not necessarily seeking one. My friend’s album above is indifferent to the audience. “Come if you want, I don’t care. This gallery is for me, I expect some of my friends will like it, but that’s not the point. So much so, that there might even be pictures I’d rather some of my friends not see, but that’s OK, cuz I want my pick me ups right here.”
We probably all have contacts on Flickr where the pictures get a little too personal, the jokes are a little too in, or they’re just getting insider goofy with their friends and there’s no reason to share. The only reason they’re being shared is because it’s too much work to lock it down. My own photostream is amused by the possibility of/semi-hopeful for an audience. The pics are there for me so I can send links around and have them available, but if someone shares my sense of humor or interest in Rosicrucian symbols, cool. I’m doing this blog partially to help sort out all the stuff I’m reading (I’m in a very unfocused stage right now, hoping it’s an plateau or inflection point). I am risking an audience rather than seeking on so that I’m forced not to write anything too stupid, and put a little thought and care into the writing.
Even within my industry (internet marketing), it’s a struggle to get people to understand the normalness of flickr and other types of sharing. A colleague of mine returned from a vacation in South America several months ago.  Eager to see pictures, I suggested now would be a good time to get into the Flickr stream. “Why would I want to put my pictures out for everyone to see?” My reply was “Not everyone . . . me!”, at which point, an offer was made to bring the pictures in. Sigh.

Another thing to do with pictures that makes any set of pictures look awesome: Piclens from Cooliris. Piclens is a Firefox add-on that does two things: 1) grabs all the pictures contained in or implied by a page (contained in is just what it sounds like, implied by is grabbing a photostream on Flickr); and 2) displays them on a cool Matrix (architect scene) wall that you can scrub through. It handles loads really well. The pic above is the Library of Congress photostream on Flickr.

The Library of Congress is putting fascinating pictures up on Flickr. There are >3000 pics up there now, but even in the first hundred pictures, there’s a wide range of subjects: TR speaking in New Jersey, baseball players, cyclone damage, early airplanes, early 20th c. fisticuffs . . .  The picture above is identified as a piece of an Oscar Wilde monument being packed or unpacked.
According to the profile, LoC is simply placing photographs on flickr with their own tag and the remaining tags are coming from the community. Comments are also coming from the flickr community. On the picture below, the comments are rather inane, making fun of the hair, but on some other pics there are links to wikipedia, clues to dating and location.

Fun facts from the profile:

We serve as the national library for the United States, based in Washington, DC. With more than 134 million items preserved on some 530 miles of bookshelves, we’re also the world’s largest library.In addition to books, we have photos, maps, databases, movies, sound recordings, sheet music, manuscripts, and information in many other formats. Millions of items are online, and the full array of collections is available in DC, right across from the U.S. Capitol building

What are photographs doing in a library?

We’ve been acquiring photos since the mid-1800s when photography was the hot new technology. Because images represent life and the world so vividly, people have long enjoyed exploring our visual collections. Looking at pictures opens new windows to understanding both the past and the present. Favorite photos are often incorporated in books, TV shows, homework assignments, scholarly articles, family histories, and much more.

The Prints & Photographs Division takes care of 14 million of the Library’s pictures and features more than 1 million through online catalogs. Offering historical photo collections through Flickr is a welcome opportunity to share some of our most popular images more widely.

Inspired by the insightful photography of Gus Powell, Grant McCracken has a post close to the spirit of people who carry cameras everywhere looking for Thoughtless or Everyday acts of design. There is much to be learned by looking around and recording, thinking about we looked at and chose to record and, most important, learning to look deeper into what hapens around us:

[Gus Powell’s photography] demonstrates how much anthropological work there is to be done, and that it is open to anyone prepared to engage in simple acts of observation. Clearly Powell is extravagantly talented as a photographer but some of the power of his work comes I think from a willingness to notice what the rest of us let slip by. That is to say, there is a Pepysian project here that invites the participation not only of the likes of a Pepys or a Powell, but anyone prepared to pick up a camera or a pen. Lunch hour anthropology is open to everyone. And I particularly love the constraint Powell puts in place. After his inspiration Frank O’Hara, he asks, “what can I see in an hour?” A constraint of this kind prevents us from being overwhelmed by everything that needs noticing “out there.” A little act of discipline makes the project manageable and this in turns makes the project possible.

Thoughtless Acts photostream on Flickr.  The picture above is from my iPhone on the F train:  he was doing multiple shapes with his origami, using some cool metallic purple tweesers for the more delicate folds and tucks.