Running as Root

Hot Flickr Action

Man, I'm liking Flickr more and more lately. I'm trying my best to get everyone I know addicted to it, too (I've started giving Flickr accounts as gifts). What's not to like? A simple method of uploading (try teaching your parents ftp), easy tagging / browsing / searching, quickly make links of resized pics, pretty much unlimited space and bandwidth, a nice API, and lots of mind share. All of this for (currently) $24.95 a year. In addition, they've partnered with other sites to allow you to do cool things like print stamps with your photos on them.

The thing that has struck me most lately is how easy Flickr has made it for people to be more creative. So far this year, I've been contacted by two people writing books and an online city guide all asking to use photos. That's just plain neat. If they didn't have a centralized repository of tons of photos (with clearly marked Creative Commons licenses and good tagging for retrieval) how much more of a pain in the ass would it be for them to get the photos they wanted? Sure, we're not quite at the dream of a full remix culture since there are still legal obstacles to using other peoples' works, but an equally large barrier of simply finding stuff is rapidly disappearing.

The Old Ways

My wife's aunt gets all her digital photos printed at Wal-Mart and then has them burn a CD (despite the fact that she has a CD burner). Then when people are over (if the subject comes up), she'll show off pictures of her last vacation, grandson, etc. I can think of no worse way for me to consume content. It's all info-silo, streaming, push model bullshit. When someone asks about the stuff, I'm along for the ride whether I like it or not. If I happen to like a picture, I'm not likely to ever see it again since it's locked up in her CD. Even for her own use, she can't find that one picture on the ship with the captain that time.

The solution to her problem is simple, of course. Wait for me to give you a Flickr account, then learn to use it / get me to teach you how to use it / tell Wal-Mart they should offer Flickr upload along with photo printing, tag those photos (unlike these people), then hand out cards or post-its or whatever with your Flickr ID on it whenever someone asks about the photos.

Break the Silo

My wife's grandmother has album upon album of photos dating back 1930s. In addition, I'd say she easily has several thousand photos. Her husband was a photography hobbyist. He took photos all over the world when he was in the military during dubba dubba two. They're all sitting in photo albums, slowly fading away. How sad. Again, get a scanner and scan them (I'm positive some of those offspring would help), upload them, don't forget to tag them, and then tell all the children and grandchildren that they won't need to fight over the photo albums when you die because they're all online. That or you could keep watching re-runs of 1970s game shows on cable.

The same goes quadruple for my parents, my wife's parents, every aunt and uncle, etc etc. It's never been easier to get that information (we're currently talking about just photos) out there for everyone to see. These are exciting times. Why aren't you living in them?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Business, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.