So I love Flickr. I think it’s absolutely awesome. I’ve been weblogging for five years (almost – see me in thirty days) and the fun I have using Flickr reminds me of the immediate joy and excitement that I used to get from writing on my site. The stuff I post there – the stuff I write there – is resolutely frivolous and personal and bears no relationship to my job, technical/design interests or the industry in which I work.
As my weblog over the last few years has changed to become more sober and more work-oriented, and as the pieces I tend to write have become longer and less-frequent, it has at times felt like posting had ceased to be a pleasure and was becoming a chore. I don’t know why that might be – possibly it’s a result of Movable Type‘s posting interface interface, the obvious practical utility and web-native aspects of the post-per-page format or maybe it’s just because of my own determination to bore the world slowly to death. Whatever the reason, I think Flickr’s gradually making me feel more positive about the whole thing. I think it’s helping me find a different parallel space where I can post in a completely different register.
For all these reasons, and because I finally got moblogging working on my Nokia 6230, I was more than happy to pay to go Pro. And thanks to Feedburner I’ve even merged plasticbag.org’s feeds with my Flickr feed to create a slightly more varied and nuanced reflection of my life (that isn’t monomaniacally obsessed with social software, comment spam or music technology). So hopefully now, those of you who are subscribing to the plasticbag.org feed (around 1,000 of you by my reckoning) will actually have something to read each day.
Of course one of the greatest things about Flickr is that it has an API that other people can hook into. My favourite example of its use recently has been the Flickr Rainbow applet that uses tagged up photos and what amounts to a tiny (and obvious) controlled vocabulary filter around colour to assemble a rainbow of photographs. I only wish that Mr Webb’s favcol was still around so that he could build use Flickr to determine the web’s favourite red or purple…
6 replies on “On Flickr, Favcol and my experience of weblogging…”
Flickr is amazing. I sent 42 photos from my US trip –I fear for the MMS costs– and the great thing about flickr is that it really adheres to Mark Twain’s advice: the letters are very short indeed.
Re: your linklog’s “Oxford Circus god-ranter”, you might like this:
“If you don’t stop calling me Satan, I’ll have to start singing show-tunes.”
http://www.livejournal.com/users/koaloha/29646.html
Thanks for the link to the Flickr Rainbow.
I’m having a bit of trouble with the speed of the initial searches, but Cal says that they are working on scaling issues with the API – http://lists.iamcal.com/pipermail/flickr-apis/2004-September/000115.html
/me misses favcol too.
Thanks for great information.
After having read this, I visited Flickr and found it’s awesome! I wrote about it in my blog with link of this page. Thanks again!
Flickr
Below pic was posted from my flickr. Flickr has very unique and interesting systems, not only posting photo, but also posting to my own blog from there. Last weekend, I read about Flickr on plasticbag.org. As soon as I read it, I visited Flickr and reg…
Flickr is a big let down for me, I was only briefly impressed. When I went “pro” my problems started. I had`placed Flickr on several blogs and on http://cottagenorth.com . When I went to check my webdesign, my photo’s were gone and I had more or less a flickr adverisement site.I finally tracked down a working address, other than paypals, to get a refund but flickr does not want to give me my money back. I cancelled my credit card and will dispute the charges.Logging into the flickr account is a harduous process as you seem to have no choice other than logging through a Yahoo account, and the cookies, in my case , did not let me have access. When I requested a refund, paypal wanted an account number and password from me. I use Visa and don’t want pay pal, somehow the choice is not quite there, and when I try to contact paypal@ludicorp.com my mail service tells me there is no such address, yet I got it from paypal . For me its Thumbs Down Flickr! I spent the whole night atempting to resolve this, plus I had to fix all my blogs to get them back as they were, my cottage north website is still ailing. All of this resembles a game my wife plays, It’s called aggrevation!