How to Use Flickr: The Digital Photography Revolution
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My friend Richard Giles, co-author of my Podcasting Pocket Guide, has just come out with a new book about Flickr, the community web site for sharing photes. Here’s a brief exceprt from the book’s introduction. If you use Flickr, or want to learn how it works, have a look at this great new book.Richard Giles says:
One evening, at the end of February 2004, while I was online in a chat room someone mentioned an application called Flickr. At the time I didn’t know what it was; it had just been launched at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, a happening shindig that is an amazing barometer for soon-to-be popular technology. I visited the Web site and logged in.
In those early days, Flickr was a different than it is now. It was born from an online multiplayer game called Game Neverending. Rather than approach online photography in a traditional sense–uploading photographs to share and print–Flickr’s approach was socially based, sharing photographs with the world in real-time. It took its lead from game interactions rather than making money from prints.
The interface for Flickr loaded into my Web browser and displayed a chat space and contacts. I could join any number of groups and discuss any number of topics. The twist, however, was the ability to instantly share photographs, dragging and dropping images into the middle of the discussion.
To my delight, the first photograph that was shared with me was a picture of a fish, with a nose. Unnervingly, the fish, known as a blob sculpin, looked like it had the face of an unhappy human–and who wouldn’t be unhappy with a face like it had. It was a great way to illustrate how easily someone could share an interesting photograph.
The fish photograph, and one I uploaded of my 8-week-old daughter, sat in my “shoebox‖a frame in the application that stored my favorite photographs. When I needed to, I could drag the images from my shoebox into a chat window, displaying them to members of a group.
Flickr was fun, but jamming another piece of social software into my crowded evening wasn’t going to be easy. So I bookmarked the site and kept an eye on it until later in the year.
By September 2004, Flickr had morphed into a completely different application. The team had been working obscene hours and had produced a plethora of new features. Photos could be uploaded, stored, tagged, described, and discussed. But the feature that caught my eye was the ability to send a photograph straight from my camera phone. I could now capture an image, and instantly send it online.
Flickr became my new best friend. I used the mobile posting feature intermittently for the next couple of months, until I had some time to play with other photographs in December. I live in Australia, and Christmas break here is long and quiet, and I now had a year’s worth of baby photos from my daughter’s first year. So I spent the next week uploading over 500 photographs.
I’d become a Flickr addict.
