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."