TechStuffCanada

jargon-free tech news for non-technical people

Our Friend, Flickr

March 15, 2005 › Sandy McMurray | comment

Thought I'd start off my contributions with a few words about the remarkable online photo community, Flickr. As an avid digital photographer, I've been a member of Flickr for several months now. At first blush, it looked like a great place to store and share photos. I had used earlier online photo repositories like ophoto and shutterfly, but found I'd lost interest quickly and just kept my images safely in iPhoto. Flickr, I quickly discovered, was different. It wasn't an online photo album, it was an online photo community for which photos were a catalyst to conversation.

That conversation is stimulated by some brilliant tools developed by the folks at ludicorp, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based company behind Flickr.

Photos in Flickr can be tagged. Tags are really keywords that can link your photos to others of their ilk. The extremely cool thing about Flickr tags is that others can add tags to your photos. That means that the community, collectively, can make images easier to find.

You can also assign your images to groups, and there are hundreds of them on Flickr. Girls Eating Sandwiches, The Wonders of Oxidation, Store Windows - they're all Flickr groups, and those are the less odd ones.

You can use both tags and groups (and user names)to get offsite notices of new images. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds can be generated from both, so you will always be aware when photographs you're interested in become part of the Flickr image stream.

You can also assign your photos to sets. Sets are subgroupings of your images by theme: winter, mannequins, photos of men with squash allergies, whatever. That makes it easy for other visitors to view your shots in digestable chunks (as Flash-based slideshows even).

Finally, members of the Flickr community can leave comments on images. Those comments often become long-running debates, commentaries or discussions.

In short, Flickr is a great example of an online community fueled by content from the community. It's the sort of site that plays the Web like a fine violin. It is exactly what the Web is about.

There have been rumours floating around for weeks now that Google or Yahoo! or some other megalith is going to swallow Flickr whole. For its founders, Stewart Butterfield and the gregarious Caterina Fake, I hope that's true. But if the would-be buyers, if any, don't get the spirit of the place it will be a great pity for the online world.

March 15, 2005 › Sandy McMurray | comment on this item