Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Maybe.

Because only a Dumbf*uck gets their asterisk all fcuked up in Dumb*uck right?

Or maybe not.

Maybe someone leaked some bogus IMs to the Business Insider who published them because they were just too rich not to publish them. And leaked them just at the moment that Facebook was vulnerable to privacy issues to get people even more rilled up.

But, whatever.

Lots of other people are reporting on a supposed IM exchange that Zuckerberg had with a “friend” (was it a chick?) back when he was 19. Some “friend” huh?

The reported IM conversation goes something like this:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Dumb f*ucks.

Leo says he’s shutting down his Facebook account. That came out earlier today though and was more in response to something that Jason Calacanis wrote I think.

Scoble offers the Zuckster some friendly advice.

I still think photos look like crap on Facebook. On that Flickrtab thing that I set up over there it seems like it stopped showing thumbnails entirely on my wall today. Anybody got any nails that they can loan me for a few weeks to finish building my barn please?

So here’s the thing with this Dumbfc*uck*k Fackebookery thing. It doesn’t matter *what* business you are in. You just can not refer to your customers as Dumpfucks. It just does not fly. People get insulted. It sounds condescending.

Now Facebookery can do one of two things. They can address this or they can ignore.

By ignoring it they are saying that transparency doesn’t matter and that they think very little of their users. And maybe they have enough addicts to get by with this. But that sucks.

Or they can address it. They can either deny it if the IMs are bogus. Or if they are in fact legit, they can get the PR team working overtime on sending out a message that it was a youthful indiscretion by a 19 year old kid who deeply regrets sending those IMs and who has done a lot of growing up in the past 8 years or whatever it is since he supposedly sent them. Maybe even put out a photo of the chick he was IMing with at the time if they think that might help.

Personally I think they should address it. Otherwise people might stop working on all their farms maybe.

Oh, and you can find my dumbass on Facebook here. Add me and I’ll add you back. Especially if you have a dumbf*cker camera over your face in your avatar like I do.

Update: Facebook has apparently now responded to this story. Good thing. Unfortunately the gist of their response is that they won’t address the IMs.

Everyone within the company understands our success is inextricably linked with people’s trust in the company and the service we provide. We are grateful people continue to place their trust in us. We strive to earn that trust by trying to be open and direct about the evolution of the service and sharing information on how the 400 million people on the service can use the available settings to control where their information appears.”

I spent some time Tuesday afternoon hanging out with Dan Plasma. I first ran into Dan a few years back when he was painting a piece on a wall on Valencia Street in the Mission.

Dan’s been painting around SF for a while and yesterday did this killer Francis Baconish piece on the side of this great box UHaul truck.

While Dan was painting, a brown UPS truck drove by and the driver kind of gave us the eye. I think it was an interesting contrast. Every day I see so many Fedex and UPS trucks running up and down the streets of San Francisco. Shouting their corporate message at us every chance they get.

And then we have artists like Dan and others out there painting their own message back on the side of construction trucks, delivery trucks, trucks full of recycled cardboard that live in Chinatown or Oakland or run around delivering vegetables in the Mission District. And these trucks, I believe, are sent to us to counteract those Fed Ex and UPS trucks. To provide an authentic and artistic voice to balance out the increasing encroachment on our public space by big corporations.

I remember a few years back when I was speeding down 101 and all of a sudden I noticed this great truck in front of me painted by ORFN. It made me happy to see that truck out on the road. To see public art shared with the world. It made me happy watching Dan work yesterday and being there to document his new work and knowing that thousands of people will see it as it rolls around the streets of San Francisco in the months ahead.

“What is more pleasant than the benevolent notice other people take of us, what is more agreeable than their compassionate empathy? What inspires us more than addressing ears flushed with excitement, what captivates us more than exercising our own power of fascination? What is more thrilling than an entire hall of expectant eyes, what more overwhelming than applause surging up to us? What, lastly, equals the enchantment sparked off by the delighted attention we receive from those who profoundly delight ourselves? – Attention by other people is the most irresistible of drugs. To receive it outshines receiving any other kind of income. This is why glory surpasses power and why wealth is overshadowed by prominence.”

Caterina Fake, Co-founder of Flickr, 2005.

Over the course of the past 4 years, about every 2 years or so I’ve written a blog post that has been one of my most popular entitled “Top 10 Ways to Get Attention on Flickr.” It’s been a few years, Flickr’s changed a bit, and so I thought I’d take a bit of time today to outline some of the techniques that active power users use on Flickr to get more attention for themselves and their photos.

Fundamentally it comes down to a pretty simple equation:

quality photos + reciprocation² = attention.

But there are lots of other little tricks and tips, so let’s get right into them.

1. The order that you publish your photos in matters — alot. A lot of people will take 50 snapshots of that killer sunset on their vacation and then upload them at random to flickr. Some are better, some are worse. At Flickr, those that call you contact predominantly only see your last photo uploaded or your last 5 photos uploaded (depending on their settings) from the popular “your contact’s most recent uploads” page. The other 45 are effectively buried. Always upload what you feel are your best, strongest, etc. photographs as the last five and save the very last spot for the photo you want to pimp the most.

2. Explore, you whore. Explore is a section of Flickr where Flickr highlights what they feel are 500 interesting photos every day.

I used to have photos show up in Explore pretty much every week. Then Flickr staff blacklisted me from Explore (and their help forum) about 7 months or so ago after I wrote a blog post criticizing Flickr staff for nuking a popular group on Flickr that I administered. Payback’s a bitch, right?

After having photos regularly appear in Explore every week since it started, they capped my ass in there at 666 photos (cute, because I’m the devil, get it?). That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider Explore though. It’s probably the fastest way to get a lot of views on any of your photos. Whilst everyone bitches about how full of crappy photos Explore is, secretly you know you all love it when your photos show up there.

Flickr claims to have a “magic donkey” formula which picks the photos for Explore. This “magic donkey” is really just an excuse though to avoid transparency/accountability about Explore. In general, the more activity a photo has (activity = faves, comments, notes, blogged, etc.) the more likely it is to show up in Explore. By putting your best foot forward (see item 1) and by focusing on promoting a popular photo of yours on a given day, (see below) it just might get there.

3. Promote your photos outside of Flickr. What are you doing to promote your photos outside of Flickr? Some things are super, super easy and involve no active participation on your part other than setting something up. Popular content aggregators on the web allow you to publish your Flickr photos out of Flickr, with valuable links back to your photos on Flickr.

Have you configured Flickr Tab on your Facebookery page yet? Why not? It’s free and easy.

Have you signed up for Google Buzz yet? Google Buzz does a great job presenting your Flickr uploads and has a killer lightbox feature that allows people to see your photo BIG (if you allow it) on Google Buzz. I’m faving more Flickr photos that I’m finding on Google Buzz these days than from any other source. I fave more photos from Google Buzz than even Flickr itself.

Have you linked your stream to a FriendFeed account yet?

How about a photoblog? Anyone can set one of these up. They are so easy. And they have cool widgets that can do a lot of automated things for you. Check out the widget I’m using for my Flickr photos (to the right over there). It’s called Fidgetr. It automatically pulls in the six most recent photos from my “10 faves or more set” on Flickr, making sure fresh new photos are constantly being published to thomashawk.com. Don’t those large thumbnails rock!

4. Avoid watermarking, small-sized low-res photos, frames and other gimmicky crap. People don’t want to see this stuff. It’s a turn off. It pushes them away. Yes, yes, I know, you cry, but the thieves, the photo thieves, they all want to steal from me. GASP!

Get over it. You know what happens when people steal your stuff? Recently a friend of mine had an image of hers taken by a commercial entity. Do you know what we did? We contacted them, and after a little arm-twisting they paid her $700 for her photo. You know why? Because they had to. Because she could have sued them if not and probably gotten a lot more than $700 if she was inclined to put the time in it. Courts award statutory damages (not actual damages) for copyright theft. Trust me. If you like getting paid $700 for your photos, you WANT people to steal them. Put a big sign on the photo. “Steal Me, I Dare You.”

With tools like Tineye, it’s getting easier and easier and easier for you to find unauthorized commercial use of your photos on the web.

Sure, some dude is going to print up your big bouquet of sunflowers shot and hang it in his living room to impress his friends while they drink beer and watch football and you’ll never find out about that use. Trust me, that dude wouldn’t have paid for your photograph in the first place anyways.

As a byproduct, uploading full, glorious, high res, original photos to Flickr gives you one more backup of your precious photos in the cloud.

5. Moooooooooooo. Do you know about moo cards? Get some. They’re cheap — well, at least the little ones are cheap. Give them to everyone you can. When you are out and about and people talk to you about your photography say (in your best Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad voice possible) “Hey Yo, I’m slinging this camera, check me out here Yo,” and hand them a moo card. Trust me, it works.

6. Groups. Most groups on Flickr are a waste of time. Dead groups where photo whores dump billions of photos in dead pools that nobody cares about and nobody sees. Your photos are quickly buried deep, deep, in the pool, never to be seen or heard from again. Avoid these groups. They typically have names like “Baskets! Show us all your photos of baskets!” or “You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato, show us all your photos of tomatoes!” Don’t just dump your photo into 30 random groups.

Instead pick a few meaningful groups and actually hang out there and interact with people. You might consider a local group for where you live. Or a photo critique group. Or whatever. But find a few active groups (meaning several new threads are engaged in a day) and participate. I belong to a number of groups on Flickr, but 95% of my Flickr group time is spent in the critique group DMU. (Note, DMU is uncensored and not for everyone. Remember above where I told you that Flickr nuked one of our groups? yep.)

7. Fave it Forward! Have you heard of Billy Wilson? Because if you haven’t, you will soon. Not to be confused with his second cousin and other Flickr legend Billy Warhol, Billy Wilson is the original Flickr fave machine! Billy has favorited more photos than anyone else on Flickr and he’s showing no signs of slowing down. Want to know what happens when you fave almost 200,000 photos on Flickr? Just check out Billy’s stream. How’s that for getting some attention? Fave Billy Fave!

Now, you don’t actually have to copy the Billy Wilson favoriting machine. He’s an original and that’s his gig. But. Don’t be stingy with your faves either. If you like something fave the hell out of it. You can start here at my “10 faves or more set” if you’d like. You have an unlimited amount of faves to give out on Flickr. People love getting faves. People reciprocate.

Be like Billy, fave it forward.

Same goes for comments too. If you like something say so. Maybe you can be the next “nice photo” guy. Or maybe you can be known as that super hot chick who writes deep, meaty, insightful, witty, quirky comments on people’s photos — especially then, you’ll be loved.

8. Tag for discovery. You know how people find many of your photos? Search. Don’t be “that guy” who tags the 300 most commonly used keywords to your photos no matter what they are. I don’t want to see that photo of your bikini clad girlfriend when I’m searching for puppy. Good boy.

But. Be descriptive. Be sure to tag the place the photo was taken. The subject matter. Anything relevant that people might use to search for your photo. Consider geotagging as well. The more discoverable your photos are, the more likely they’ll be seen on Flickr.

Oh, also keyword at the file level, not on Flickr itself. It’s much faster to keyword and geotag that way and also when Flickr ends up nuking your account (KABOOM!) you won’t lose all of those tags and geotags that you worked so hard on adding to your photos. When you tag/geotag at the file level, these tags/geotags are automatically populated at Flickr when you upload your photos. Read about my workflow here for more on that.

9. Are you allowing the search engines to index your photos? If you aren’t, you should be. You can check your settings on that here. I’d estimate that about 20% of the traffic to my own Flickr photos comes from search engines. Oh, and while you are in your settings, you might want to take a second and turn safe search off, we’re all 18+ adults here right, even if Flickr does treat you as a child by default? Filtered Flickr sucks.

10. Certain subjects just seem to garner more attention. In general I’ve found that certain subjects tend to do better on Flickr than others. Your (and my) Egglestonian masterpiece of the sidewalk curb? Not so much.

But. Subjects that seem to garner a lot of attention. Attractive women (number one attention getter on Flickr, especially self portraits), motion or blur, silhouettes, images with stories in the description, some HDR, bokeh, abstract architectural photography, bridges, cityscapes, artwork by famed graffiti artist Banksy, you get the idea.

Also sometimes an interesting looking thumbnail will pull people in as well.

Well there you have it. 10 tips to get you more attention on Flickr. Use them in good health and with good company.

Disclaimer: remember my equation above? “quality photos + reciprocation² = attention” It doesn’t matter how much work you do optimizing the promotion of your photos if they suck. Find your voice. Make your style. Create your art. But put time, energy and pride in the work that you share. Make the world a more beautiful place with the amazing work that you are capable of creating. The best photos in the world have yet to be taken.

Oh, and one final way to get a lot of attention on Flickr? Write long blog posts about getting attention on Flickr. It works every time.

You can find me on Flickr here.

fiftyseven-thirtythree store Grand opening from Fiftyseven-thirtythree on Vimeo.

5733
4125 Piedmont Ave, 2nd Floor
Oakland, CA
510-547-5733

We make all our gear in East Oakland using water based, solvent free inks. No art directors, consultants, or teleconferencing were used in the production process. We hope it makes you look good, feel good, get laid…whatever makes you happy. Cheers. – 5733 Facebook page.

On Saturday May 1, I had the opportunity to attend the Grand Opening party of 5733 on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, CA (that’s me in the moving pictures video above shooting SF sex blogger Violet Blue and Pal Ben Metcalfe).

5733, with the tagline “made in Oakland,” is the latest venture by local graffiti artist Eddie and features a number of his new stencil pieces on display as well as a store where some of his art and t-shirts can be purchased. The evening featured music by TBBS and Lankston and was a great event to support one on of the top local artists currently doing work in the Bay Area.

I first started noticing Eddie’s work on the street back during the campaign for the presidential election in 2008. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but the interesting Obamas in starter caps were actually his. Since then Eddie continues to put up fresh new innovative pieces around town combining political themes with his own artistic sensibility. Eddie told me that he’s also got a few up and coming new commissions going up around town as well, which is great.

If you missed the opening, it’s not too late to stop by 5733 and check out some of Eddie’s great new works (tip: definitely visit the dressing room, some of my favorites are in there) as well as pick up some up some great new threads supporting one of the Bay Area’s great local artists. 5733 is open Tuesday – Saturday noon-6pm.

5733 Blog here.
5733 on Facebook here.
Eddie on Flickr
My Eddie set on Flickr here.