Flickr + YouTube = del.icio.us
Aug 9th, 2007 by Laurie
Flickr and YouTube are overwhelming. Exploring the content in a meandering kind of way frustrates me because I come across more content that I don’t enjoy than content that I love.
The brilliance of this massive pile of content is the way in which we are allowed to spy on it. Flickr lets users compile lists of favorites as they are browsing. YouTube gives us channels. del.icio.us is the beast that lets us browse anywhere on the internet and share our favorites. Add our favorite feed reader to that equation and we have a tidy way to keep up on the content we most enjoy. There are many ways to keep up on the content you enjoy. You can subscribe to a blog written by someone you admire, you can find someone who reads articles you like and follow what they are reading or you can stumble across a complete stranger who works in your field and follow their bookmarks.
These tools provide a way for professional, elite and everyday photographers to feed their creativity, find community and entertain the rest of us. They have opened up the art, the hobby, the practice and the culture of photography to the masses. I hear criticisms of flickr from professional photographers. They think the existence of flickr cheapens their work. The reality is, the tool is available to everyone and if used correctly, it will increase the value of the professionals’ work. How has flickr improved your photography?
Flickr and YouTube are doing to professional photographers and videographers what the opening up of dtp and free truetype fonts did to typesetters and layout designers 10-15 years ago.
It’s true, that true professional work will be of increased value in certain circles - mainly by other artists in the know - but the flip side is that it becomes that much easier to cobble something together yourself with Publisher that might look cr*p, but it’s cheap and fast and you’re in control; and the same
will beis already true for photos.The good and excellent will still make a (possibly better) living, but the average Joe’s will have to find other pastures in which to carve their new niche.
But that’s the way things have been going since the first cave(wo)man discovered a better way of preparing meat. Some things expand, new possibilities open, others disappear.
I have a somewhat love hate relationship with flickr; these days. When I signed up in 2004 I was impressed by the number of people who seemed to want to push the boundaries of what a photograph was and could say, these days as it has reached critical mass I tend to spend more time in there for social reasons, rather than seeing and sharing photos. What flickr has done for me though, is made me re-engage with the entire process technique, light, editing and creation of bodies of work etc, it has also allowed me to appreciate that digital photography is a powerful tool that few really understand beyond HDR/Tone Mapping and Photoshop.