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Changing the ways I use social media

I have a feeling the latter half of the last decade is going to be remembered for how we rushed into social media: Flickr! YouTube! Twitter! Facebook! Foursquare! I know I rushed in— sometimes like a fool. In some ways, I’m glad I did; in other ways, I’m already looking back on the 2000s with the same disbelief as I’ve felt about other fads I can’t believe I followed.

However, I’m not down on social media; I guess you could say I’m “down with it.” I’m just making some changes to the way I use it. Here they are:

Flickr

I once said I felt chained to Flickr. Well, I certainly don’t feel that way anymore. Coincidentally, I also haven’t had a photo in Explore in over a year. What I have realized, although I suspected it before, is that Explore is really just a popularity contest. It has nothing to do with the quality of your photos (though it may have something to do with the quality of your photos); it’s really generated by how many times you comment and fave other Flickrites’ photos and therefore how many people comment and fave your photos– and how quickly. If you don’t spend much time on Flickr looking at other people’s photos and commenting and faving them, others are not likely to spend much time reciprocating. I know that the photos I take now are just as good as the ones I used to take–if not better–but all I do anymore is post a photo or set of photos, and when I have time force myself to comment and fave other people’s photos so as to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. If I add photos to a group, I will view some other photos in that group and comment and fave the ones I like. If I admin a group, I will look through the group and thank a few members for sharing certain photos.

I’m not disingenuous— I only comment, fave, and thank if I really like the photos, but I must admit it often feels like an obligation, because I barely have enough time to share photos on Flickr anymore much less look at others. My conscience tells me, though, that if everyone who posted photos to Flickr never looked at anyone else’s, Flickr would be all artists and no appreciators. Yet even that’s not entirely true, because there are plenty of “lurking” Flickr members and plenty of nonmembers who view Flickr photos— they don’t produce; they just consume.

Once in a while, a friend of mine on Facebook will post some photos to Flickr, I will see the link to those photos, and I will go and have a look. Sometimes this is just to be reciprocal, but usually it’s because I’m genuinely interested in the photos. If I’m really not interested, I don’t look. Also, I almost never post photos to Flickr “friends only” or “friends and family only” because all my friends and family are on Facebook now, which leads me to the next social media channel… Read the rest of this entry →

Posted in Communications & Media

Flickr tags not changing case

Dec 18

Posted by Daniel Greene

Flickr tags not changing case
Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

Has this happened to you on Flickr lately? You’ve tagged photos at various times with lowercase and title case keywords, and you decide you want to make them lowercase for standardization. You go to your All Tags page and click Edit to the right of one of the lowercase / capitalized tags in the list; for example, I wanted to standardize “accessibility, Accessibility” to “accessibility.” After clicking Edit, I get an “Edit this tag” page that shows Accessibility in the text entry field, and below that, a line that offers “Or, use a different format: accessibility” with “accessibility” as a hyperlink. I click accessibility, and Flickr puts the lowercase version of the keyword (tag) in the text entry field. I click Save and a dialog box pops up that says, “Are you sure you want to replace accessibility with accessibility?” (I know that looks odd, but the first instance of “accessibility” in that sentence is the database version of the tag, which will always be lowercase, and the second instance is the display version of the tag.) I click OK, but does Flickr change the tag? No. And there are only four (4) photos are tagged with that keyword! This has been going on for me for the past three weeks. In fact; the first night, I wasted two hours changing tags from title case to lowercase only to find out in the morning that Flickr hadn’t changed any of them.

If you think I’m crazy for caring about tag standardization and spending two hours working on it, then this blog post is not written for you. I know this is not something most people care about—and, God, do I know there are worse problems in the world!—but I’m sure there are a lot of others out there like me who do care about this and are bugged by it. This screenshot got 5,704 views in its first 24 hours on Flickr, so obviously I’m not the only one who’s having the problem and searching the Web to find out who else is.

I posted about this problem in a thread in the Flickr Help Forum three weeks ago and have not gotten resolution. Two weeks ago, Flickr staff changed the title of the thread to “[resolved] Batch tag update not working“– even though the problem is not resolved. If you are still having this problem, I encourage you to go to that Help Forum thread (link above) and let them know this problem is still unresolved and you would like them to fix it.

Posted in Consumer Reviews, Writing for the Web

IPTC Scene Codes to make your photos more searchable

Dec 2

Posted by Daniel Greene

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing the photos in my Aperture Library to make my photos more searchable to potential buyers. I spent some time looking into stock photography references such as the Getty Images Keyword Guide and the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) website to learn how to make it easier for people to find and Request to license my Flickr photos through Getty Images or me. In the process of SEO-ing (Search Engine Optimizing) my photos, I’ve found that many of the keywords recommended for stock photography are also IPTC Scene codes.

If you have an image editing / photo organizing application, you may input these scene codes in the IPTC Scene field under the Image section of the IPTC Core metadata. These codes (or keywords, if you will) help describe what a photo is “of.” You may also wish to add them as keywords or “tags” since sites like Flickr make it possible for people to search for photos by “tag.”

I’m sharing these IPTC NewsCodes™ under the IPTC licensing agreement. I hope these metadata help your photos and mine to be found and purchased in a prosperous new year!

IPTC Scene Codes

Copyright 2010, IPTC, www.iptc.org, All Rights Reserved.

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Posted in Communications & Media, Creative Arts, Writing for the Web

Review of 2009 and Goals for 2010

Dec 11

Posted by Daniel Greene

I haven’t felt like writing a blog entry in a long time, but I have been updating my friends, colleagues, and the world about my life in other ways. This morning, I feel moved to recap the previous year and look forward to the next.

I continue to take photographs and share them on Flickr. Some of my recent adventures include hiking Camelback Mountain for the first time, a weekend getaway to Jerome, going to the Arizona State Fair for the first time in the five years that I’ve lived here, going “full frame” by trading in my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and EF-S lenses for a used Canon 5D, and meeting a longtime Flickr friend from Brooklyn who visited me and my husband with his husband. It was great to bring the online life and real life together, and we all really hit it off. There are several other photo sets I’ve posted in months since my last blog post as well. The best way to keep up with what I’m up to in a visual way is to follow my Flickr photostream.

I’ve also really gotten into Facebook this year. I don’t add people I don’t know as Friends, and I don’t have a Fan Page, but I do enjoy keeping up with my friends through status updates, photos, videos, links, etc. I am sort of the designated photographer at gatherings of friends and coworkers, so it’s always fun to upload an album from a shared event and tag everyone in it who’s on Facebook– which is most of them. For a while there, I was spending a couple/three hours a day on Facebook, but I’ve cut back because I have so many other priorities. I felt I was neglecting my photography and Flickr social circle for a while there, so I’ve returned to spending a bit more time on that. One thing I love that Flickr added in the last couple of months is People in Photos, which allows you to tag your Flickr friends in photos the way you can tag your friends in photos on Facebook. Those friends have to be Flickr members in order to be tagged, so it’s most useful for photos from FlickrMeets; that is, when a group of photo geeks get together to go on a shooting spree. Not necessarily good for your neighbor’s family’s Thanksgiving party unless they’re all Flickrites themselves. Thanks to this new feature and my general hamminess, I can now point you to photos of me on Flickr. As of this writing, there are over 900, though I’m not sure they are all public!

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Posted in Communications & Media

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Tags: deaf, experience, Facebook, Flickr, goals, holiday, interpreting, memories, New Year's, personal, photography, presenter, resolutions, review, social media, travel

Struggling to Manage My Use of the Internet

Sep 19

Posted by Daniel Greene

I have struggled to manage my time on the Internet ever since I first got online in 1995. I hesitate to say that I have an Internet addiction, because I don’t like all the baggage that comes with the term “addiction,” but I will say that there are times I spend too many hours on Web sites. And maybe I do have an Internet addiction.

Lately, I notice — especially with Facebook — that I get pain in my elbow and wrist from so much mouse clicking to follow everyone’s posts. I read all my Friends’ postings, regardless of how well I know them, and I just keep reading and commenting and reading and refreshing pages. There are people in my Friends list that I’ve spent more time with on Facebook than in real life. But no matter what our relationship in real life, I find myself reading everything they post. It begins to seem as though my “best friends” are the ones who interact with me the most on Facebook. Yet that’s insidious, because it doesn’t mean they’re closer to me; it just means they’re on Facebook a lot and they like to interact with people on it. It’s seductive to sit there clicking, clicking, clicking on everyone’s content, yet I have to do something about my overuse strain. I am, after all, a sign language interpreter, and I have to save my hands and arms for work.

And speaking of seductive, it is so tempting to add all the people Facebook suggests to me as Friends– well, all the people I know, anyway. I never went and added all my friends Friends or anything crazy like that, but I did add almost all the classmates, coworkers, and friends I recognized. It got to the point where I had 378 Friends! As I started following more closely, I realized that I hadn’t even remembered some of my classmates correctly. In one case, I thought I was following a guy who was one class ahead of me until I realized that I was following his brother who was two classes behind me. He seems like a great guy, but the last straw was when he made that “tell me something you remember about me” prompt in his status message, and I realized, well, I didn’t remember anything.

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