Thursday, January 11, 2007

Lazy Hippo


Lazy Hippo
Originally uploaded by tonninods.

Woo hoo, this would be the entry for thing 5, where I blog on an interesting flickr photo. Now, about Lazy Hippo himself, there is only so much to say ... he's in a zoo, he's used to exposure. We humans, perhaps less so.

About flickr, it should be remembered that it is a commercial enterprise, and one that has competitors in it's market. Smugmug, photobucket, pbase, webshots, and more. Including many out there whose operations and interface use other languages. Tho' I drink Coke (a lot of it) I as a librarian am probably not inclined to recommend to users Coke over Pepsi because it's more cool. And it is more cool, really.

I used smugmug myself for my last vacation pitcures because I find their interface easier and faster.

Taken as a whole, these photo sharing sites simplify the process of posting photos to the web so much that it changes everything. Lots of people point to YouTube as having an impact on the last election; the larger corpus of photos out there has the same kind of impact, just not as headline grabbing. For examples (1) its documented that people have been fired, hired, disciplined at school, etc., for photos from these sites, (2) for pro and pro-am photographers who don't have their own (expensive and hard-to-keep updated) websites, these tools provide a front door to their business. Seems to me that as bands from the international stars Oasis to local tidewater rockers Rooks must have myspace pages now, those photographers seeking to enhance their reputations, get new clients, and work in a community on their art, those folks have to get on flickr. And it's in the communities, the conversations, and the high end photos that flickr seems to pass it's competition. For good phtoographers, it must be a great place to share.

2 comments:

Steven said...

...and I have never heard of a rum and pepsi.

Karim Khan said...

many a pepsi products bar is out there though, sneaking around... probably in Massachusetts, land of pepsi-products only eateries