Flickr 101 for Newbies

How to: Flickr Into at BenBishop.me.uk Ben Bishop has written a nice write up on the basics of Flickr that you might want to share with your friends and family that you are trying to recruit into the cell.

More Proof that Flickr is Like Crack

The IR - Flickr Addiction: "And yes this does seem to fall into a “web addiction” for those technical people, I have no clue why such a company can have you (”make you”) constantly check your feeds (flickr has feeds.) for updates. This is of course something new for me, since I’ve never been the type that weeds through every single user page checking to see if or any new content seem available but as of lately I have been doing this !"

Andy Goetze Interviews Fotolia CEO Thibaud Elziere: Microstock Sites Going After the Long Tail of Digital Photography

StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog: Interview With Fotolia's CEO Thibaud Elziere: "Microstock Sites Can Capture Up To 30% Of The Existing Market": Andy Goetze runs the excellent blog on stock photography news and is out with an interview with 26 year old Thibaud Elziere. Elziere is CEO of Fotolia, a new micropayment site for digital photography. He calls his service a "social marketplace," and is going after the long tail of the stock photography business. With millions of budding amateurs with digital SLRs these days Elziere is hoping to capture their attention, some of their work and offer them compensation in return.

"We think that we can get share from the traditional stock photo agency but above all we will focus on the not yet targeted market that couldn’t afford photos before (SOHO and individuals for example). We think that microstock sites can capture up to 30 % of the existing market and create a new market that will be as big, if not bigger, than the one that already exists. Only one or two big micro stock sites will survive, I hope we will be one of them. "

Yahoo’s Flickr Blocked by United Arab Emirates

Search Engine Journal � Yahoo’s Flickr Blocked by United Arab Emirates / Dubai The first "official" news story I've seen on the subject.

FlickrNation, Episode 3

New website home flickrnation.com. You can vote for the podcast on Podcast Alley here. The RSS feed for the show is here. Contact info: tom@thomashawk.com, Yahoo Messenger: thomashawk22, Skype: thomashawkskype, Phone: 415-992-5350.

FlickrNation, Episode 3,

Download the show here.

Show Notes:

0:00 Flickr Jingle, Show Intro

1:38: Is Flickr Being Blocked in the UAE? A petition to to ETISALAT to unblock Flickr in the UAE.

4:15: Entrance to Hell Group being capped at 666 members.

6:50: Sam Judson's New Blog Deleteme Resurection.

7:28: Should Flickr allow drawings and illustrations on Flickr?

15:30: Flickr passes Webshots in Alexa Traffic Rankings. Webshots founder Narendra Rocherolle responds.

21:54: Flickr Toy: Name that Contact.

23:55: Sears 1979 Wishbook is on Flickr.

25:10: Top 10 Ways to Improve Flickr, Almost Certainly the Best Online Photo Management and Sharing Application in the World.

42:55: Other Flickr members feature wishlists.

50:53: .22, Huggy Bear (well kind of).

Seattle Flickrites December Saturday Photostroll and Meetup at Copacabana (Saturday, December 10, 2005)

Upcoming.org: Seattle Flickrites December Saturday Photostroll and Meetup at Copacabana (Saturday, December 10, 2005) There is a Seattle Flickr Meet Up on December 10th.

MetaFilter on Photo Sharing Site 23

23 | MetaFilter Metafilter on photo sharing site 23. " It's like Flickr, a lot like Flickr--and maybe better. Better at some things. Stories. Upload limits. The layout. Ordering prints. They are doing things from the beginning that Flickr worked a couple years to figure out in the first place. Flickr of course is way ahead of 23 in numbers (people and money). Does it make sense to challenge that lead? (And to do so with an overt knock-off?) If 23 provides a better service, should they lose out for being second to the party?"

Photo Sharing Site Zoto

Zoto A short write up on the new photo sharing site Zoto.

Is Flickr Being Blocked in the United Arab Emirates?

Flickr: FlickrCentral Some United Arab Emirate bloggers are reporting that Etisalat the major telecommunications company in UAE is blocking the site Flickr. I have not seen any formal news on this topic but one Flickr user provided the following response from Etisalat: "We are treating flickr as we are treating pornographic sites. the increasing number of porno pictures in the pages was what made us block the site. we will NOT unblock it, as we did before, because we consider it to be a pornographic site and we will not allow those kinds of images to be viewed by our users. sorry for the inconvenience." For more on the conversation you can follow the Flickr Central thread on the subject here.

During my time as a Flickr user I've noticed a small but vibrant and very active community of UAE members on the site.

Flickr and WebShots - A Classic Web2.0 Case

Flickr and WebShots - A classic web2.0 case Well it would appear that this week, at least according to Alexa, for the first time Flickr has overtaken Webshots in traffic. It's been a trend that has been in the making for a while and I would suspect, having tried both services, that Flickr will continue to dominate over Webshots.

In comparing the two sites it would at first glance appear that Webshots has more users but less active users. At least as of last year Webshots was reported to have had 14 million users (I would suspect possibly less today). The most recent number I've seen from Flickr was 1.5 million users reported in the Business 2.0 article on November 14th. Although Flickr probably has less users, the users that they do have are most likely significantly more passionate users and evangelizers of the Flickr experience. Although I've not seen people refer to Webshots being as addictive as crack, it is a frequent comparison I've heard with regards to Flickr.

In my own experience having tried the two services I found that I preferred Flickr immensely for a number of reasons. Webshots seems to be much more advertising invasive than Flickr. Where Flickr serves up small little AdSense style ads to non-Pro users, Webshots has more of a robust advertising feel including larger flash based ads. If you do a search on WebShots it gives you back your results with an ad on the top, an ad on the side and an ad on the bottom all three. It also feels clunky compared to Flickr's smooth and sleek design.

I also didn't like the fact that without a paid account it does not appear that Webshots allows you to view high res images. Assuming the user authorizes it, Flickr allows anyone access to their high res images, both free and pro accounts.

Most of all though, I've found the community tie ins in the groups at Flickr to be a far more engaging experience. The Flickr sub communities that have sprung up are some of the stickiest out there and provide a rich and meaningful online social networking experience. I've made many personal friends through Flickr -- although to be fair, I can't say I really tried much on the social aspects of Webshots.

For what it's worth Webshots does seem to generate quite a bit of traffic to your images. Webshots Founder Narendra Rocherolle and I traded blog posts a while back earlier this year about photo sharing and image search when he was still with the company. His involvement in the photo sharing business prompted me to try out Webshots at the time. I uploaded 160 photos to their site in total and since doing that in June, my photos at Webshots have been viewed 142,646 times. I was featured there as an "Editor's Pick" on their main home page so that may have helped. Other than uploading those 160 photos though I have not been at all active on their site.

On Flickr on the other hand, I have been on longer and much, much more active. I upload photos every day, participate in numerous sub communities, have uploaded 2,876 photos, blog my Flickr photos at thomashawk.com, run a Flickr site and podcast and spend hours each day on the site. By contrast I have had my Flickrstream viewed 181,962 times.

I was surprised at how much traffic Webshots generated for my images with virtually no interaction at their site or significant promotion on my part.

Others have also begun to see Flickr as a superior site over Webshots for images. Earlier this month PR Blogger and Pro Steve Rubel was nice enough to mention my photostream in an article he wrote for his blog, Ten RSS hacks, that was subsequently featured on G4's Attack of the Show. From Rubel: "I like to change my desktop wallpaper as often as I eat. So I used to subscribe to Webshots Premium. No mas. Thomas Hawk posts new original images every day in Flickr that are just incredible. I subscribe to his feed and download ones I like."

Of course people in the photo sharing business probably saw this coming sooner and perhaps none sooner than Webshots founder Narendra Rocherolle himself. For those of you who don't know Narendra, he was the founder of the original Webshots photo sharing service who made a pretty massive fortune selling Webshots not once but twice -- once to ExciteAtHome in 1999 for $82.5 million, near the height of the dot com boom, and then after buying it back a few years later for $2.4 million, he sold Webshots again to CNET for $70 million last year. If Flickr was sold to Yahoo! for what has been rumored to be somewhere around $40 million, then it looks like Yahoo! may have gotten quite a bargain. And they still have Stewart, Caterina and the original Flickr development team working in their business in significant and meaningful ways.

After sticking around at CNET for a while Rocherolle left the company earlier this year and has now started a venture called 83 degrees. If you go to their website (you may need to go in IE instead of Firefox) you'll see a tag cloud that looks a bit like something you might find at, well, yep, you guessed it, Flickr.

There is not a lot of information on 83 degrees, but they do seem to be working on something called 30 Boxes, Spliced (a weekly video blog) and something called weatherjam.

Erik Solheim asks the question, "Webshots started as a general photo sharing site in 1999 and are celebrating their 10th anniversary as a brand these days (they started out as a professional service around 1995). Flickr emerged around February 2004. So, how come that a new site with a name that is difficult to spell and impossible to pronounce can rival Webshots after less than two years?" Indeed Erik. I suspect that those of us who have become Flickr addicts understand and that many more will understand in the months ahead.

By the way, Erik came up with the idea in his original post for this story. I've subscribed to the RSS feed for Erik's excellent blog for a while now. He blogs about Media Center as well and comes up with some pretty good stories regularly. I'd encourage you to subscribe to his site. If you like what you see I'd also encourage you to put a vote in for Erik's blog for Gullbloggen. What is Gullbloggen you ask? Erik's blog has been nominated by one of the biggest newspapers in Norway as the best Norwegian blog blogging about technology. Although I have to be fair and say I don't read all that many Norwegian blogs regularly, along with the charming Elinesca's blog (she's also Norwegian) I've found Erik's to be one of the best.

Update: Narendra Rocherolle took some time out to respond to my post above and has some corrections as well as some additional significant insights into the photo sharing business. His entire response can be read here, but I will post some of what I felt were important points and a couple of follow up thoughts:

"Webshots has no capital S. Never has, never will."

Sorry about that Narendra. I should do a better job proofing things like that. I changed it in the post above. I can't change it in the headline though because it will invalidate the link with people who have already linked the story. I'll make sure not to make this mistake again.

"High resolution images are availble to free members on Webshots."

That may be true but for the shot I tried it on, "Valley of the Gods," by Jonathan Cummings I was prompted with this message: "Only Webshots Premium members can download our highest resolution photos (1600x1200 pixels). Highest-resolution quality allows you to see every vivid detail of your photo in crisp, clear colors! Upgrade to Webshots Premium and start downloading our highest resolution photos today!"

"It is a stretch to consider Webshots a Web1.0 company for numerous reasons. Webshots was the pioneer of a public photoblogging on a grand scale and has afforded millions of people the opportunity to quickly become involved in community and discussion around photos for many years. The business was sold a second time because of its very very long tail."

Good point. Web 2.0 is difficult to define at best and perhaps not the best headline for the story.

Narendra also points out that per Alexa Photobucket actually ranks higher than Flickr and Webshots right now. He also adds: "When it comes to ratings, all these lists and charts are unfortunately only minor gauges. They all have flaws and are prone to wild swings."

Good points Narendra.

Narendra also added this little bit as to the rumored price of $40 million that Yahoo! paid for Flickr. "There is a profound irony in the philosophy of “transparency” and the reality of deal structures. Everyone would love to know how much Weblogs, Inc. was sold to AOL for and the price is most certainly less than the wild speculation. The only semi-reliable data about the Flickr deal comes from Rafat scouring the Yahoo! 10Q to come up with

- In Q2, Yahoo bought three companies: the total estimated purchase price for all three was about $37 million and consisted of $32 million in cash consideration, $3 million related to stock options exchanged, and $2 million of incurred liabilities and direct transaction costs. That price includes the three publicly announced buyouts I could find: Flickr, DialPad, and Stadeon."

Narendra has much more detail and more thoughts on the photo sharing business and I'd encourage you to read his post in it's entirety.

Thanks for taking the time out to respond Narendra and I'd love to catch coffee sometime.

Flicktionary: A Glossary of Flickr Terminology

Flickr: FlickrCentral An oldie but goodie Flickr Central thread. Are you familiar with pool jacking, Flickrati, Tag whore, Flickrcide, Stalkr, and Born Again on Flickr?

Flickr as a Platform?

The Verse Organisation Weblog: "Flickr has no API roadmap because they fly by the seat of their pants even though the API is absolutely integral to Flickr. Developers using the API would like more transparency to know when new features and fixes will get implemented to know where they stand even though they realise long-term planning is futile. Flickr's API is not a development platform, it's an interface. Or perhaps it is? If so, does it actually add value either way, and what is its revenue model? "

Name That Contact

FlickrBlog Flickrblog has a link to a new app called "Name That Contact" that allows you to guess who in your contact stream a given photo belongs to.

Fast Company Profiles, Stewart, Caterina and Flickr

Point, Click, Design "How do you create the future of Web apps? By accident. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield (above) are the husband-and-wife team behind Flickr, the photo-sharing site that launched in February 2004 and quickly got so popular that Yahoo acquired it a year later. Flickr wasn't born as a fully realized idea--in fact, it wasn't even originally for photo sharing. But its building blocks make up a successful Web 2.0 application. Here's how it evolved."

Happy Thanksgiving

heart, originally uploaded by foreversouls.

This photo is the top ranked photo on Flickr for the tag Thanksgiving when sorted by interestingness. To see all of the Thanksgiving photos sorted by interestingness click here.

Sears 1979 Wishbook

SearsWishbook.1979C.P610, originally uploaded by Sears Wishbook 17.

Someone has uploaded every page of the Sears 1979 Wishbook with their Flickr account -- a fantastic trip down memory lane. I used to spend hours and hours looking at these when I was a kid. I think these books were designed by psychologists for the maximum impact on kids.

Post Thanksgiving San Francisco Flickr Meet Up

Monthly meeting of San Francisco Flickr users. Meet other Flickr fans, socialize, and show off your latest work or camera gear. All are invited!

12/1/05 @ 7pm
Crossroads Cafe

More details.

Thanks, Mark!

Hoboes Bum Rushed from 700 Hoboes Project on Flickr

Jawbone Radio: Hoboes Bum Rushed from 700 Hoboes Project.: There seems to be some controversy around the 700hoboes tag on Flickr with the Jawbone podcast suggesting their drawings are being censored.

Top 10 Ways to Improve Flickr, Almost Certainly the Best Online Photo Management and Sharing Application in the World

1. Introduce full screen slide shows. There is nothing quite like the experience of sitting in your living room and watching beautiful photographs float across a 43” plasma. With a soundtrack to your life playing softly in the background, the kids playing on the floor and a nice glass of white burgundy, watching your photos float across the screen is the perfect compliment. As TiVo and Media Center turn your living rooms into virtual photography galleries, Flickr should develop full screen slide shows for users to watch their photostreams, their friends’ photostreams, and the photos you have selected as favorites.

Flickr should also create smart filters that randomly show photos from your contacts or specific lists of contacts that you can build for specific events. Imagine how cool it would be to (announced at upcoming.org or course) put together a flickr meet up at a venue with multiple plasmas. Then take the flickr RSVP list and run their photostreams through a filter and have that filter randomly show their work at the Flickr meetup. Talk about WOW factor.

As part of a full screen slideshow initiative Flickr should definitely build a Media Center plug in specifically. Media Center will hit mainstream adoption next year. Seeing your flickr stream and favorites in full screen mode on your Xbox 360 or Media Center PC would be white hot. In order to do this in a cost efficient way, Flickr would most likely need to move the originals of photos off of Flickr and on to users’ hard drives (high res photos running for 2 days when you forget to turn them off would be very bandwidth intensive). It would be important to protect these files. They should be acknowledged but invisible and inaccessible .jpg files that you CHOOSE to allow on your PC in return for the experience. Microsoft should be able to protect these files with DRM.

2. Provide users sitemeter style tracking information. Part of sharing in the blogosphere means knowing about where the conversations about you are going on. Although Technorati can be used to track some of the external links to your flickr stream, what is needed is a flickr based referral system to track both internal and external links to and from your photostream. This referral information should provide basically the same information that sitemeter does including allowing you the ability to rank your incoming links, etc.

3. Develop a stock photography matchmaking service that Flickr users could opt in to. The top 5% of Flickr’s photography at present is every bit as good as what the pros are turning out at the stock photography houses. Flickr should build a stock photo business that undercuts Getty Images by about 30% and provide a 50/50 split for money raised with their photographers. As most on Flickr are amateurs, they do not have the knowledge or connections to get into the stock photo business. Flickr should provide an easy path (for those that choose this) and provide education about the various issues regarding rights clearance where necessary and should have a department to maintain waivers for rights clearance in cases where images might contain people or businesses.

4. Integrate Flickr’s interestingness algorithm into Yahoo! Image Search. Where applicable, Flickr’s interestingness algorithm is vastly superior to both Google and Yahoo! Image Search. Although Yahoo! And Google Image Search are more complete, where Flickr does have top ranked photos they should incorporate these into the Yahoo! Image search algorithm to appear as first page results. This will promote their Flickr brand and provide a substantially better image search experience for the Yahoo! Image Search User.

5. Build a spellchecker that spell checks all the text on your flickrstream including titles, descriptions and especially tags. Many tags are misspelled at present and giving the option many people would want to correct this.

6. Develop a rewards based incentive program to promote Flickr – especially with top photographers. On each users main home page flickr has the following: “Invite your friends and family. Why? Flickr is so much better when your friends and family are on it. When you log in their new pictures are there, and they automatically see yours.

Indeed. While I’m sure people use this all the time, how about promoting it by creating a simple ranking of the top referrers of others to flickr and reward the top 25 with free flickr pro accounts and build a contest for the number one referrer. This would be the cheapest PR buzz they could ever buy.

7. Increase the speed in three specific areas: when adding your photos to groups, when you pull up the most recent comments made on your photos, and when you search. Not sure what needs to be done here but the speed needs to be improved.

8. Make interestingness the default search vs. most recent photos uploaded. Typically the most recently uploaded photos when you do a search are not that interesting. Why not give people the best photos first and let them use most recent as a back up if they so wish.

9. Allow users to sort their contacts’ photos by interestingness. I’m constantly finding super great photos of my contacts. Many of my contacts have photostreams of over 2,000 photos. I would like the ability to sort my entire list of contacts by how Flickr ranks their photos from an interestingness standpoint. How many new gems would I find? I’m sure many. This would be much more efficient than having to hunt through all of their streams. In addition I should be able to pull up all of my contacts photos ranked by favs and filter out those shots that I have already fav’d. If I’ve fav’d it I’ve seen it and know about it. Help me find the best shots from my contacts that I’ve yet to see.

10. Private favorites. Allow me to privately fav photos where only I and the photographer who is hosting the photo can see it. Many people are hesitant to fav… ummm…. “certain” photos that they would like to go back and view as favorites as everyone else can see what you fav. With full screen slide shows this would also be important. Although you might find a particular edgier photo interesting and want to fav it, you may not want it shown in your living room in front of all of your friends at the next Flickr meet up that you hold at your home. This is one of the reasons why a lot of the edgier work on Flickr has lots and lots of views but a relatively low fav/view ratio.

Yahoo: From Dot-Com Survivor to Web 2.0 Powerhouse

Yahoo: From Dot-Com Survivor to Web 2.0 Powerhouse eWeek.com is out with another article, along the lines of a number of other articles published recently elsewhere, about Yahoo! integrating Web 2.0 services into their core offerings. "Through a series of clever acquisitions and in-house creations, Yahoo Inc. has transformed itself from a dot-com survivor into a Web 2.0 powerhouse driven by blogs, podcasts and other forms of user-generated social media."

Like the other articles on this subject recently, Flickr is brought out as the posterchild for social networked content at Yahoo!

"Another big coup for Yahoo was the acquisition of Flickr, a photo-sharing service built around a tight-knit community of users.

Flickr lets users upload digital images from camera phones and computers and set up photo albums for sharing with the community via blogs and RSS.

Flickr helped popularize the idea of using tags to trigger random associations of images and the result is a slick, wildly popular tool used by millions.

Since the acquisition, Yahoo has already meshed Flickr with its Yahoo 360 social network and a new blog search tool launched within the Yahoo News property.

Interestingly, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake now heads up the My Web 2.0 social search product, a clear indication of Yahoo's plans for aggressive cross-integration of multiple products.

Horowitz looks at Flickr and sees endless possibilities and, although he is careful to avoid discussing future product plans, there are hints that the Flickr technology can be extended to power things like user-generated audio and video uploads."

Six Degrees of FlickrNation

Non-Tech City: Flickr Idea: From Non-Tech City: "Another good option would be to be able to see a page of all the links that point to you from within Flickr, to enable you to see whose photostreams you are in. This brings about all sorts of fascinating possibilities with the social networking side of things, which would enable people to write code to draw network diagrams of who is in whose stream, like a six degrees of separation idea."

Non-Tech City is blogging about something that I and others have been asking for for a while from Flickr. Why not let us see where our referrals are coming from?

While not exactly a sitemeter account per se, it would be helpful for me to know where/who fav'd traffic is coming from, what outside blogs are linking to my photos, what groups I'm being mentioned in, etc. It would seem to me that this would further foster community and I can't think of a good reason not to do it.

I brought this idea up to Stewart at the SF Apple Flickr meetup and he said that if they did this that people would spam it. I'm not sure that I agree with this. I have a sitemeter account for both of my blogs and people don't spam that.

For a while in the deleteme uncensored group a lot of us were playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game was a lot of fun for all of us and I was looking like a regular genius until Big Frank had to blow all the fun and point out that we were just using the Oracle of Bacon to make the connections -- (hey who says using a computer is cheating). After that we passed a rule aimed directly at BigFrank in the group that finking wasn't allowed any more... but I digress.

If Flickr added referral activity one fun Flickr toy someone could create would be the six degrees of FlickrNation. Similar to the Oracle of Bacon (and I guess kind of like Linked in?), you could enter in your Flickr user ID and any other Flickr user ID and find the connections through other users. Flickr members could provide introductions for other Flickr members, etc. etc. I like that idea a lot.

Pedestrian Boxes in Emeryville

ped box 5
Originally uploaded by Jef Poskanzer.

Cool, Jef Poskanzer has a great set of Pedestrian boxes from Emeryville!

Living On The Edge and the Value of Flickr for Bloggers

A VC: Living On The Edge (the rise of the edge feeders) Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson has a great article out today called Living on the Edge. Basically Fred talks about ways that people are blogging and using tools like Flickr to enhance their content. This is different than Google's new Googlebase program according to Fred.

Fred mentioned my Flickrstream in his post as a tool that I use and called it an "amazing photo blog." Thanks for the compliment Fred.

I wanted to pass along my comment on the experience of posting my photos at both Flickr and my personal blog that I shared in a comment on Fred's post:

"Hey Fred. Thanks for the mention of my flickrstream.

The thing I really like about Flickr is that there is already an audience there of people who are community minded and passionate about digital photography.

While I post my photos on my regular thomashawk.com blog as well as flickr (and actually get more traffic at my own blog because for some quirky reason Google Images ranks my photos very very high), it is the community aspect of sharing on flickr that is of the most value to me. To be able to get the instantaneous feedback on Flickr from other like-minded photographers is very precious fuel and serves as great inspiration.

At it's core, it is the community aspect of Flickr that makes it a superior blog for photography for me over my own personal blog. While you give up some control issues (style format, html, custom features, the ability to track referals, etc.) what you get in return is an attractive sleek simplified space (I think of flickr's design as almost a virtual art gallery or museum) to host your thoughts and images at a very inexpensive price for the bandwidth that you might consume. You also get an instant audience for your work and an internal rank system (interestingness) that brings new viewers to your top images regularly.

Flickr in turn gets an annual subscription fee plus ad revenue for ads shown to non-pro users.

In my mind this is a win-win-win. I get something great, people get to see my work, and Flickr makes some money.

Further, I've made many real in person personal friendships with the people that I've met through Flickr -- friendships based on a shared passion that has been very deep. A worthwhile experience that I'd recommend to amateur photographers everywhere.

Thanks again for the link."

MercuryNews.com: Yahoo Gets Personal

MercuryNews.com | 11/20/2005 | Yahoo gets personal: The Mercury News (for a registration password go to bugmenot) is out with yet another article on the flickrization that is going on at Yahoo! Caterina and Stewart are reported to be evangalizing the power of social networking to all of Yahoo!'s various departments:

"But Flickr layered on key features that set it apart from the Ofotos and Shutterflys of the world. For starters, the assumption of the Flickr service is that you want your photos to be public. People comment on each other's photos, even those of strangers, using the digital images as a communal bond. This approach taps directly into the same cultural instinct that drives blogging -- the urge to create and share content online.

Tagging is another important piece of the Flickr puzzle. People can add keywords that describe the photos' content, making them instantly searchable and groupable. Motorcycle enthusiasts could find 5,048 photos tagged ``motorcycles'' last week.

Tagging allows Internet users to cluster content into their own categories, collectively building a grass-roots index of the Web. And tags can be the glue that binds groups of people together. Flickr users, for example, will often create tags around certain events, offering a way for attendees to collectively organize their photos.

The concepts that form the core of Flickr -- tagging, sharing and community -- are spreading through Yahoo's many departments. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, visited with most Yahoo departments to understand how a Flickr approach might help their products by involving users more. It's what Yahoo executives are now calling the ``Flickrization of Yahoo.''"

Flickrcast Episode 5

flickrcast: flickrcast - Episode 5 Flickrcast Episode 5 is out.

FlickrNation, Episode 2

FlickrNation, Episode 2,

Download the show here.

Show Notes:

1:00: New website home flickrnation.com. You can vote for the podcast on Podcast Alley here. The RSS feed for the show is here. Contact info: tom@thomashawk.com, Yahoo Messenger: thomashawk22, Skype: thomashawkskype, Phone: 415-992-5350.

2:30: Two new Flickr features: Auto-Magically Rotate and Allow Blogging.

3:45: Yahoo!'s logon process to get "flickerized" according to Stewart Butterfield.

5:45: Flickr mentioned on CNET's news.com, Tagging Gives Web a Human Meaning.

8:40: Flickr Staff blogs: Sylloge (Stewart Butterfield), hchamp.com (Heather Champ), caterina.net (Caterina Fake), iamcal.com (Cal Henderson), george08.blogspot.com (George Oates). The link I mentioned from Cal's blog on corporate logos and their colors.

14:37: Hypergene MediaBlog, Using Flickr for Product Marketing. iView Multimedia. Thanks for the link Steve!

16:26: Wrong number call in on Skype during the podcast by a 90 year old woman without a computer or digital camera. (Sorry about the bad sound quality from her, I wasn't expecting a call in from a wrong number so the mic didn't pick up so well).

21:00: Shayne Bowman and using Flickr for Product Marketing continued.

23:00: One Google AdSense ad is ok for your blog when linking to and using Flickr as a non commercial personal site.

26:55: Is Less More? Heather Champ asks, should the number of tags on Flickr photos be limited to less than 100?

31:08: Fav/View >= 5% Group. Top poster, Aqui Ali.

34:00: New FlickrNation Group on Flickr.

Hanging Out With Flickr Friends

Catchy Colors Will Do It
Originally uploaded by Elinesca .

Spent last night hanging out with Elinesca (who is in town from Boston for an educators convention training type of thing), Caitlin Burke, and SFBuckaroo. Lots and lots of Flickr talk and other fun. It's great that you can show up in another City and instantly have a friendship with the people that you meet on Flickr. Elinesca took this photo of Caitlin and I. The only bad thing was that I forgot to swap my battery out of my camera so it was dead and I went through massive withdrawls not being able to shoot. It was pretty cool though playing with everyone else's cameras -- a fun and different kind of experience for me. Caitlin, Elinesca and SFBuckaroo all have shots up from our little mini kind of Flickr meet up last night.

New Features From Flickr

From Flickr News: New Account settings! Auto-Magically Rotate (if the files you upload contain usable orientation information) and Allow blogging (or not as it were -- you can hide the "Blog This" button from anyone who doesn't have permission).

Gridskipper Photo Contest, Win a Free Flickr Pro Account

Gridskipper - Gridskipper Gridskipper.com is holding a photo contest where readers can vote on nominated photos. Monthly winners get a free year of Flickr Pro access. Their current contest is up and the polls are open until November 23. You can sumbit photos to be considered for future polls to their Flickr group pool.

Richard Prince Print Sets Auction Record For Photography

Prince Print Sets Auction Record For Photography "An untitled cowboy photograph by Richard Prince set a record last night for the most expensive photograph sold at auction, with a price of $1,248,000."

Heh. I just know my digital photography habit is going to pay off ANY day now!

The best part: "Asked by e-mail for his reaction to the record-setting sale of his picture, Prince wrote back: "When it happened last nite [sic] I was at home wrestling with my eight year old daughter in our bed watching the World Series of Poker, eating the last of our Halloween candy and drinking hot chocalate [sic]."

Delete Me!

Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology: The folks at the deleteme group get a shout out from The Independent in an article on digital photography:

"Techniques like framing (getting only what you want in the shot and excluding the rest), timing and setting are still elusive skills for the majority, though you can judge yourself against the best of the amateurs on the photo website Flickr, whose 'Delete Me!' group puts up the very best photographs in front of a baying crowd eager to mark them down. Only the best survive. And in photography, that's just how it should be. Happily, with digital, it is."

If only they knew about the much better deleteme uncensored!

Move Over Getty Images, the Flickr Train's Heading Right at You

Media Orchard, by the Idea Grove: PR Firm Idea Grove is out with a post on the future of the stock photography business. I'm quoted in the article from a previous article I wrote about Flickr's role in the future of stock photography.

Idea Images seems to agree that the landscape for the stock photo business will be changing in the future:

"If I were Getty Images or Corbis, for example, I would be very concerned. As Thomas Hawk explains:

"Why couldn't Flickr displace the world's largest photo licensing company Getty Images or Bill Gates' stock photography competitor Corbis? Have you seen some of the photography up at Flickr lately? It is stunning. Although primarily taken and posted by amateurs, the top shots on the site are every bit as brilliant as anything I've seen from the pros."

Guess what? I've bought, and continue to buy, stock photography all the time. And I completely agree with Thomas.

Sure, there are copyright issues to be ironed out, as there currently are across all content-based industries. But in time -- and probably sooner rather than later --they'll be resolved."

Using Flickr for Product Marketing

Hypergene MediaBlog: Using Flickr for product marketing Hypergene MediaBlog has an article out on how companies can use Flickr for product marketing. Shayne Bowman of Hypergene Media Solutions helped set one of his clients, iView Multimedia, up with their own Flickrstream. Included in iView's photostream are photos of their product packaging and screen shots designed to promote the features of their products. They make use of Flickr's notes to give their images a more interactive feel, include tips and tutorials as well as infographichs (illustrated concepts about their software program).

I have to say I think this is super innovative on Shayne's part. As I'm sure iView already had all of these images, to load them up to Flickr probably only took a few seconds and the added exposure certainly can't hurt. It also gives them a place to direct people who are looking to write articles about their products to get high quality images.

The only problem I can see in all of this and the question that I have is would this kind of a Flickrstream violate Flickr's terms of use agreement. Flickr's terms of use agreement is pretty unambigious: "Flickr is intended for personal use and is not a generic image hosting service. Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited."

When Nick Starr got into his trouble with Flickr, Flickr's Founder Stewart Butterfield was quick to point out that despite the fact that he did not like Flickr's "brand" being associated with Starr's T&A sites, that the real issue for his blocking FlickrLicio.us at the time was because they were a commercial site and not a personal site (the main distinction seemed to be the fact that Starr served up ads on FlickrLicio.us). Wouldn't these professional photostreams for companies like iView be considered a form of commercial service? And as blogs and company websites link to these photos on Flick and use Flickr's bandwidth would Flickr object?

Personally I can see where these kinds of photostreams are kind of cool and personally I like the idea. I think it would be great for cutting edge companies that I write about to have images on Flickr for me to link to. But is this a double standard when sites like Nick's are objected to as "commercial" sites.

And what makes a site a commercial site? One of my favorite sites that is in my short list for RSS reads is Scott Beale's The Laughing Squid. Scott covers much of the fantastic underground art in the Bay Area and is a great read. The Laughing Squid does have a Flickr photostream though and this photostream is frequently linked on their site (although The Laughing Squid does host themselves their largest photos on their main page site). The Laughing Squid includes what look like advertisements for Boing Boing and High Fructose on their pages (but these could in fact not be ads at all). Scott certainly sells Laughing Squid hosting services from his site, but hey what's wrong with that? Even as Scott's Laughing Squid site has a commercial element to it, it is in my mind more of a personal site and I'm really glad he's got a photostream at Flickr and I check it out all the time and have fav'd many photos in his stream. It would be a loss not to have it there. And I can't imagine that Scott's site is the kind of big business commercial site that Stewart would ever object to.

But what if a personal site for instance uses Google's AdSense? Many personal bloggers use AdSense to help defer the cost of their sites. Do they suddenly become "commercial" sites? Although I don't have any ads, I could someday and if I did would this be grounds for Flickr to kill all of my links that I have spent so much time adding to my blog?

So the question for Flickr is where do you draw the line between personal sites and commercial sites. Perhaps the better answer is that rather than specifically disallow "commercial" streams in the TOU, Flickr staff should make these kind of determinations on a case by case basis. I suppose you could always appeal to Stewart or someone senior at Flickr if you felt a determination was not fair.

As Flickr's TOU states, in addition to prohibiting commercial sites, Flickr has pretty broad control over who gets to use their service and who does not anyway: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time."

Article on Tagging and Flickr at CNET's News.com

'Tagging' gives Web a human meaning | CNET News.com CNET's news.com has a story out this morning about tagging and Flickr and other web services companies that are employing tags.

"In Flickr, tags worked because they were fundamentally social," said Stewart Butterfield, Flickr's co-founder. "By agreeing on a tag in advance, users could collectively curate collections of photos in a dead simple way. Now we see people announcing at events, 'The tag for this is baychi05' and stuff like that."

Jane McGonigal: "When I go to Flickr and I tag people's photos, it's to show them that I care," she said. "It's like a hug."

Janella.com Says Amongst Photo Sharing Sites, Flickr is the Best of the Bunch

Janella.com, Too Many Photo Sites to Choose From Janella.com reviews four of the current photo sharing sites: Flickr, Zoto, Fotki and Smugmug. Her conclusion: Flickr wins. "[Flickr is] [t]he best of the bunch. You can’t beat the price for a paid service. The community, if you are seeking comments on photos you have taken or want to make comments on what you see, is very active. It can get brutal at times, but overall it’s nice to see people interacting online."

Yahoo!'s Registration Process to get Flickrized

From Yahoo!'s Stewart Butterfield via Flickr Central: "One of the results of Flickrizing Yahoo! will be changes to the registration process for getting a Yahoo! ID (reducing the required bits to what's really necessary). I don't know how long this will take, but hopefully it'll be speedy."

Interestingness Is to Flickr As PageRank Is to Google

The Googleplex Blog: Interestingness Is to Flickr As PageRank Is to Google Harold Davis' over at the Googleplex Blog writes about Flickr's interestingness and says that in a lot of ways the algorithm is very similar to Google's Page Rank technology.

""There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr."

There's an implication of recursiveness in this description. My photograph will have more interestingness if the people who view it, comment on it, and mark it as a personal favorite themselves have a high interestingness quota--which, in turn, can only be the case if these people have been favorited (etc) by those with relatively high interestingness.

The recursive nature of Flickr's interestingness makes it analogous to Google's PageRank--the complex site ranking system used by Google that ranks sites fundamentally using the PageRanks of the sites that provide links ("inbound links") to the ranked site."

Although this may make a certain amount of hypothetical sense, I think that the greater intensity focused on human filtering at Flickr works better than Google's Page Rank algorithm. The problem is that Davis seems to be comparing web search to image search. Apples and Oranges. A better comparison is to simply compare Google's Image Search results with Flickr's Image Search results.

What you will find when you search Flickr's image search results ranked by interestingness (which by the way guys, should be the default view) and compare them to Google Image Search results is that Flickr's results are vastly superior. Google Page Rank may work well when dealing with text and blogs, but it does not work near as well when dealing with images.

A limitation of Flickr's Image Search of course is that their universe is much smaller than the Google Images -- but a couple of points on this.

1. Flickr is growing. Now with 1.5 million members their library will only get larger and larger. Still they should do more to incent the best photographers to post on their site. They should create a rewards program to recruit photographers as well as figure out ways that top photographers can monetize their work through Flickr -- integrating Flickr search results into Yahoo! would be a start at minimum.

2. For most search results only the first two page search results matter anyways. What difference does it make if Google has 1,600,000 images for the term "love" and Flickr only has 1,600 (these are not actual numbers) if Flickr's first two pages return superior images?

3. The strength of Google Image Search / Weakness of Flickr Image Search is in the comprehensiveness. Flickr needs to improve here. Flickr has all the best shots of cats and dogs and sunsets and flowers and San Francisco and New York that you'd ever want to see. They are not so good at finding obscure images that you still can find at Google Image Search even if the quality is worse. Sometimes a bad photo is better than no photo at all. Do a search for Irtish (an obscure river in Russia) and you get zero results from Flickr and 244 from Google Image Search.

Of course a way for Flickr to compete here would be to simply give interesting photos as ranked in flickr the highest page ranks on Yahoo! Image Search. Then Yahoo! image search would have the best of both worlds: a high degree of relevance for popular Flickr subject matter with the breadth that comes with the more automated algorithm that they are currently using for Yahoo! Image Search when Flickr has no images.

Seems pretty simple to me -- but I repeat myself.

FlickrNation, Episode 1

FlickrNation is a new Podcast about everyone's favorite photo sharing service Flickr. I just recorded the first episode and you can download it here.

Show Notes

Intro: 0:00

News

2:00 Flickr to offer photo printing services.

2:57 Flickr's new book printing service through Qoop.

3:42 Flickr's new "Replace This" feature.

Flickr in the blogospere

5:00 Anil Dash, Caterina Fake and should Flickr's interesting photographers share in Flickr advertising revenue?

9:45 The Flickrization of Yahoo!

12:39 Interestingness.

15:35 Other Flickr podcasts: Flickrcast, The Deleteme Uncensored Podcast.

16:00 Deleteme and Deleteme Uncensored.

17:29 Journey to the center of Yahoo!

19:11 Sitemeter for Flickr and Technorati.

21:25 Nick Starr and FlickrLico.us.

25:23 Flickr and the Pornography Problem and Mr. Chalk says he's done with Flickr (time for him to go outside and smell the flowers).

27:51 Blogebrity interviews Heather Champ.

28:50 Music Credits: Back in the Sunshine Again, by the Sunshine Family and Bernard, by Eloi Brunelle

29:30 Back in the Sunshine Again, by the Sunshine Family

If you have comments for the show feel free to leave them for me on Skype thomashawkskype or you can simply phone (415) 992-5350 and leave a voicemail message for the show.