Month: February 2010

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Photographers are Flocking to Google Buzz

Photographers are Flocking to Google Buzz

Yesterday my Pal Justin Korn posted a simple query to Google Buzz asking people to post to his Buzz if they were a photopgraher and on Buzz and so far over 100 different photographers have posted to his thread. It seems like photographers are flocking to Google’s latest social network and for good reason. Here’s another view of many of these photographers from Justin’s blog.

Buzz displays your photos much more elegantly than they do on Flickr. As you upload your photos to Flickr, or Google’s Picasa (where I’ve started getting more active myself), your photos are imported into Buzz as a stream of nice looking large sized thumbnail images. But here’s where it gets better. Click on an image and Buzz loads up the image’s full large size, in all it’s glory. I don’t know about you, but I love looking at images really big *much* more than I enjoy looking at the medium sized 500 px default that Flickr shows. Rather than have to leave the page that I’m on (like on Flickr to see an image big) I can instead just advance through the images with the keyboard one by one.

Each image includes a link back to flickr/picasa where if I want to I can click on the link and it will open that image in a new tab on my browser to go fave or comment on or do whatever I want on flickr/picasa.

While you are on Buzz you can “like” a photographers import, or comment on it, or whatever. I’m finding that Buzz is every bit as social as a site like Flickr is for photographers and am having some really great conversations about my own work. If you are a photographer, come join us.

Are you a photographer and on Buzz? Then definitely post your info to Justin’s thread above. Are you a photographer and not on Buzz yet? What are you waiting for, come on over, the water’s nice. It’s another great place to showcase your work. Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to spend time socially interacting on Buzz, you still might want to at least link it up to your Flickrstream so that people that want to follow your work on Buzz still can.

If you’d like to follow my stuff on Buzz you can find me here. I’m going to be very active on Buzz in the days and weeks ahead.

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Vote for “Photography is Not a Crime” for Best Blog in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Blog Contest

My Pal Carlos Miller runs what is probably the best blog in the world right now chronicling problems and issues that photographers have with legal photography, Photography is Not a Crime. Carlos regularly publishes stories about photographer harassment, arrest and other unfortunate situations in order to shed light on the important rights that we all ought to have to pursue our legal constitutionally protected right to photograph in public. He provides a valuable blog and service for all photographers.

Carlos is out of Miami and his blog is running right now in 2nd place for the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper’s best overall blog contest. It’s sort of a pain in the neck because you have to actually register with the Sun Sentinel in order to vote for his blog, but I did it and I hope you consider doing it to. If you care about photographer right’s his blog is doing a great service for all of us and it would be nice for him to get some recognition down in Florida from the mainstream press for it.

If you’d like to vote for his blog you can learn how to do that at this post here.

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An Open Letter to Bryan Lamkin, SVP, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo! Regarding “Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to Make the Web More Open and Relevant”

Dear Bryan,

This morning I read your announcement over at Yahoo!’s Yodel Anecdotal Blog about your new relationship with Twitter. First off, congrats on that. While many of us have already moved on to more conversational platforms like FriendFeed and Google’s Buzz, Twitter indeed is huge. Kayne’s too busy being creative for it yet, but pretty much everybody else is there, even Oprah and John Mayor.

But there was one thing about your post that was bothering me and so I wanted to take a second and address it in a letter to you. And that was the phrase that you used in your blog post alligning this recent move with “Yahoo’s Open Strategy Y!OS” to make the web “more open and relevant.” (Emphasis mine, but to be fair, your words).

My biggest problem with your describing a Yahoo initiative to make the web more “open and relevant,” is that as a *heavy* Yahoo user, this has not been my experience. In fact my experience has been the opposite. So I read things like this and they just smack to me of pure PR spin, not as bad as Yahoo’s current Big Lie $100 million marketing campaign that “the internet is under new management, yours,” but something that should be addressed.

You see, when a company says they want to make the web more “open and relevant,” there are three ideas that immediately come to mind.

1. Uncensored.
2. Transparency.
3. Open Standards.

Uncensored. Bryan, did you know that if you live in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, India or Korea that Flickr censors your content? India was just quietly added to the countries that Yahoo censors last year, but it’s true. Are the people at Y!OS aware of this? Because censorship does *not* make the web a more open place. It makes the web a more closed place.

Did you know that some of what is censored out of these countries is stuff like public art and sculpture or paintings that hang in museums? I’m not kidding. I took a photograph of a painting hanging in the Oakland Museum of California in an all ages gallery for anyone (even kids to see) but if you live in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, India or Korea, Yahoo won’t let you see it. I wrote a blog post about this last year when Yahoo decided to censor another photograph of a painting that I took at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Heck, do you know that just last year here in the United States Yahoo nuked an entire group (Deleteme Uncensored) containing over 3,000 threads and conversations about things like politics and music and photography and art, without warning? As your Yahoo! staffer was deleting it she tweeted out (ironic, given today’s twitter announcement, huh) “I hate your freedom.”

Is this what Yahoo means by a more “open and relevant” web?

Transparency. Part of the transparency problem at Yahoo Bryan is that it’s near impossible to get any issues like those above addressed. Sometimes people turn to other outlets like Buzz (where if they are a high profile blogger with access to the mainstream media they *might* get their issues addressed). But generally there is no way to have a conversation about these sorts of issues. Criticism is verbotten. When people criticize, at least in the Flickr help forum, threads just get locked. Heck, I’m permanently banned from the Flickr help forum (more censorship) myself. At least I can write a blog post about some of these issues because, thank God, my blog isn’t on some sort of Yahoo platform.

Open Standards Does Yahoo support PubHubSubbub Bryan? If so, great, if not, why not? I’d like to be able to have my content at Flickr flow more freely (and quickly) over to your competitor Google on Buzz. Will you support this open technology in the future?

What about contact portability? One thing I’d like to do is to automatically import all of my current Flickr contacts over into Buzz. This could easily be done if the Flickr API contained email information where their emails (when they’ve explicitly chosen to share their email with me under their preferences) could be matched up to their buzz profiles. Does the Flickr API allow for this today? If not why not? Again, I’d ask these questions in the Help Forum instead but I’m permanently banned there.

Personally, I’d love to see some of these problems above fixed and I’d love to be able to really nod my head in agreement when I read that Yahoo is serious about a more “open and relevant web.” That would be much better than me shaking my head in disagreement and writing letters.

Feel free to have a conversation about these things in the comments below here, or I’ll also link this thread to the Yahoo! Anecdotal blog post and we can have them there, or by email, or heck even by phone. But don’t be a stranger, write back when you’re not so busy tweeting all over the place on Yahoo.