Until I decided to redesign this site, I spent a lot of time uploading and tagging my ~2,000 photos on Flickr. It wasn’t always this way. I used to have Menalto Gallery locally installed on my server instead, because I tend to err on the side of controlling my own data. I was a little derisive of Flickr, to be honest. There was a lot of hype, and it was just a photo site. Whatever.
This all changed when I went to my job interview for my current position. I met a few people at the time, and one of them I instantly liked. She looked a little too old to be on board the web culture clue train, but she asked me great questions about my work with Google maps, forums, and then, to my surprise, Flickr. She suggested, essentially, that it was a great way to virtually visit a place. I don’t know how she meant it, but that’s how I heard it, and I realized that it was true.
I put this to the test, searching for Stokes, a favorite State Park of mine. To my wonder, some of the photos were familiar — not because I recognized the general scenery, but because I suspected I, too, had taken pictures of that same exact mossy tree. It was strange to think that a handful of people, who I would never know, had looked upon a particular spot and reacted in the same way I did.
I saw, too, that my interviewer was right — I could indeed get a sense of a place with the right search. It wasn’t fair, thorough, or timely, but it was there. More importantly, my thousands of pictures could improve it. Flickr could be more than just a vanity site or a dumping ground a la photobucket, but an archivist and repository. It was, in some way, actually altruistic. At that moment, I was sold, and my account reflects this realization, going beyond ‘pretty’ and ‘professional’ to include the far less glamorous ‘historic’. They answer questions: this is what you get at the local diner, this is the stage size for the King of Prussia Irishfest, and this is the costume you should expect to see at a Ren Faire*.
I once had a Googler friend who tried to sell me on Picasa. I didn’t like Google’s uploader at the time, but the main reason I gave him had to do with the above. Not enough people search Picasa like they do Flickr, and it’s not about the features *I* like best (Smugmug anyone?), but where my information can get the most exposure. I realize this is a catch-22 — refusing to use a less popular site because it is less popular — but he seemed to understand my point. (I see Google has caught onto this by introducing user content and pictures into Google Maps, and I’d be completely onboard panaramio by now if someone hadn’t already taken my username.)
This may seem like a loveletter to my Lady of One Vowel, but it is not. As much as I enjoy and believe in Flickr, I can’t make it work corporately. On the surface, it is very attractive to companies — a wealth of categorized information on your brand or activities relating to your brand. Do a search, throw the results in a badge or collage, and voila! Web 2.0 shiny.
Until…
- Your Washington Monument badge get the randomized photo of a stack of beer cans, impressively shaped like a narrow tower.
- Your Monmouth Food Court collage returns a volley ball court barbecue in Monmouth, New Jersey. (For example, Monmouth Food Court turned up a bizarre picture of a diseased leaf against an American flag as its 8th picture, along with a Barbados monkey, a Veterans memorial, and a tugboat.)
- Mischievous teenagers find your Favorite Flickr Dog Contest and purposely vote a picture of a cat to the top.
Granted, you can avoid the last possibility by avoiding contests altogether, but don’t think this isn’t a real danger: Chevrolet discovered this when their user-made Tahoe commercials started including lines like “Yesterday’s Technology, Today.”
As for the other two, you can’t avoid them. You just can’t. “Monmouth food court” in quotes? Nope. No results. Search tags only? That returns pictures of a kid eating a hotdog. Monmouth foodcourt, tags or text? Only 1 picture.
This isn’t wrong behavior. It’s not malicious of someone to tag a photo of a child at Monmouth Food Court as such, even if you can’t see anything distinguishing that food court from Piscataway Food Court. It’s just a by-product of tagging. It introduces both order and chaos. Perhaps one day we will have a system of primary and secondary tags to indicate what is pictured, vs the related informative tags. Today is not that day. Until then, you cannot rely on Flickr search to return a dependable result set, in which dependable is defined as having an obvious picture of what you specified, consistently.
You could create your own group and moderate submissions, but that’s a lot of involvement. If you allow people to vote on pictures — thumbs up, thumbs down — the system could still be gamed with a concentrated effort. At best, you could restrict voting only to ‘bury’, which will make sure no one can purposely make a bad picture float to the top for long. However, even one viewing of the wrong picture can be one too many when you’re dealing with minors, religious groups, or a government agency. A consent form won’t solve this — even if Johnny’s parents can’t legally complain that he saw a bong in his “My Fave Sk8terz” widget, they can make a fuss about it publically. Perhaps Johnny can screenshot it, too, handily posed with your precious brand name, and send it all around cyberspace with some funny captions.
Unless that is the PR you want to risk, Flickr won’t work for a company. I wish it could.
*As an exercise for the reader, imagine the picture that answers all these questions at once.