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Sunday, September 24, 2006
Dear Fellow Flickr Users

1. Please use tags responsibly. Tags are used to label subject matter and assist Flickr users in searches. When I want to type the word bunny into the search box, for instance, I expect to find thousands of pictures of cute bunnies. I do not expect to find:

a. Your dog named Bunny
b. Your girlfriend named Bunny
c. Your girlfriend named Rachel, who is wearing bunny ears
d. Your child wearing bunny ears
e. Your dog wearing bunny ears
f. Some random shit that has absolutely nothing to do with rabbits

Same for Houston. Don't tag stuff "Houston" if it is not recognizably in Houston. That day you went to visit your cousins at your grandma's house, which just happened to be in Houston? That day does not need to be commemorated with hundreds of Flickr pictures of your cousins at the dining table, ALL TAGGED "HOUSTON."

Okay? Can you grasp the concept? Okay, thanks.

2. If you want your Flickr pictures to remain private, why not make them accessible to your friends and family only? You might have noticed that Flickr provides that option.

If you don't want to make your pictures private, though, then don't freak out when strangers view your pictures and comment on them. Don't write gaspy blog entries about how creepy it is that strangers wanted to view pictures of your precious child wearing bunny ears, and how some of them had the nerve to comment such vulgarities as "Cute kid."

Unless, that is, you're one of those people who writes public blog entries and then totally freaks out when strangers read and comment on them. You know - one of those people who answers a stranger's comment with, "Uh, hello. Welcome, I guess. May I ask how you found my blog?" (Answer: "It's on the Internet, stupid.") One of those people who follows up that comment with a blog entry that says, "I didn't realize, when I started this little journal of my personal observations, just how many people in the world have nothing better to do than to seek it out. So I am going on hiatus - possibly a permanent one - and, in the meantime, if anyone knows of a job where I won't be punished for writing about my boss's physical shortcomings in a public forum, then please, please email me."

If you are one of those people, then don't worry about my Flickr advice, because you don't understand the Internet to begin with, and a Darwinian virus will probably remove you from my path sooner or later.

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9:46 PM #

Comments:

 Well said and so true.


# posted by Blogger lisal : 9:52 AM  

 While I agree with your second point, I do not agree about your position on tags. If I have a friend named Bunny, you'd better believe that I will tag it Bunny. The tags are not solely for other Flickr users, they also help those of us with thousands of uploaded photos to find certain photos at a later date. Besides, I've stumbled on tons of interesting photos that have been, according to you, improperly tagged.


# posted by Blogger Lobstar : 4:40 PM  

 Yeah, what lobstar said. I use name tags on Flickr for my own personal use. Social networking tags are messy because they're uncontrolled. Sorry, I'm lapsing into librarian-ness--I almost started talking taxonomies.

But an enthusiastic "hell, yeah!" on the rest of this.


# posted by Blogger Kaijsa : 5:16 PM  

 Lobstar and Kaijsa: Your point makes sense if you're using Flickr for your personal use.

But I'll admit that I had no idea people were using it that way. Are you storing photos on Flickr instead of on your hard drive, or are you storing them on Flickr in addition to your hard drive, in order to use Flickr's tagging capability?

I have thousands of pictures that I *don't* upload to Flickr, and I sort them on my hard drive as necessary. Maybe I'm being silly, tagging my Flickr ones for other people and not myself.


# posted by Blogger Gwen : 9:36 PM  

 Hi Gwen,

Yes ma'm!

I don't have a flicker account, but if I do in the future then I will follow your rant. . .er. . .avice!

Janice~


# posted by Blogger Janice : 2:59 AM  

 Gwen, I'm with the tags are for me, and not necessarily helpful for others.

I used to only use Flickr for photos for public consumption, but then some EVIL HORRIBLE AWFUL people broke into my flat and stole my laptop, and I lost three years of photos. So, you'd better believe that I'm using Flickr now for all my photos as a backup.

Once my insurance company gets around to replacing my camera and my computer, that is.


# posted by Blogger Alice : 8:45 AM  

 Oh, that makes sense.

To be candid, I was being snotty as hell, because I forget that just because I can back up all my stuff to my gwenworld.com server, that doesn't mean everybody else in the world can. Duh.

(I'm not going to erase the entry, though. I hate when people erase entries in which they're proven wrong or inconsiderate. Look, everybody - I was being wrong and inconsiderate! I can admit it.)


# posted by Blogger Gwen : 8:58 AM  

 I just want to speak up for the naive among us -- my first creepy internet experience really opened my eyes a lot because before that I had my little bloggy thing and my "in-person" friends knew about it and all and of course I *knew* it was on the internet and public and I took care to write things that I didn't mind anyone else reading, but though I intellectually grasped the concept of "public" I never had really thought through the wider implications of it and what I would do if anyone other than my friends ever took notice. Then the creepy experience happened and it sort of put me off of the whole thing and made me really think about it and realize that maybe I wasn't really ready to be "public" after all. It just so happens that in my personal experience, flickr was intertwined with the whole thing. But that was right when flickr went Big and my comfortably anonymous circle of flickr beta-tester acquaintances exploded into this vast network of energetic and vocal strangers really quickly.

To be honest, your post was so on the mark with what happened to me that I first thought, "Good God, is she talking about me? I don't think I sounded THAT snivelly about it!"

So, count me among those that, sadly, did exactly what you said. I wasn't trying to be a baby about it though -- honest! I just chalk it up to a learning experience and am much more cynical about the whole thing at this point. :)


# posted by Blogger jam : 3:35 PM  

 Jam: Aw. I'm sorry. It sucks to read bitchy "blind items" and think they might be about yourself. No, I didn't mean you, I don't think, and I'm sorry you had a bad experience with an Internet psycho.

It's happened to me twice that I follow a link from a friend's page to someone else's, then leave the other person a comment and get the snotty, affronted reply. (Like, "Who are you and why are you reading my site - it must be so you can stalk and kill me.")

Then, in my experience, the pissiness over blog publicness in general usual occurs when someone starts a blog in order to ay ugly things about their "friends" who don't use the Internet. Then, their friends (bosses, coworkers, spouses, whatever) find the blog and get mad. And the blogger has the nerve to be pissy about it, as if they weren't trying to be covert jerks, themselves, in the first place.

I do know what you mean about not understanding the totality of the publicness. I try not to say anything on my blog that I wouldn't say in real life. Even so, sometimes I'll get an email from someone in my past or on the very periphery of my life, and it'll kind of creep me out.


# posted by Blogger Gwen : 4:04 PM  

 I think it was a case of "yes, it CAN happen to you." I mean, I read a lot of blogs and shake my head at the obvious weirdos who seem to having nothing better to do than take some poor blogger to task about their parenting skills or their lifestyle or whatever (which, what the fuck?) but in the back of my mind be thinking "well, Gwen is famous, of course the weirdos come out of the woodwork" or "well, Dooce is famous, etc."

Then, one day, you're having a nice chatty conversation with a commenter and thinking rosy thoughts about how awesome the internet is and make an offhand throw-away comment like "man, birds are kind of creepy, huh?" and suddenly you've inadvertently insulted someone's bird fetish and what do you have against ORNITHOLOGISTS and it degenerates into comments about your personal appearance and suspected parentage and they KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE and... yeesh? I was just... you know... pictures of flowers and stuff? It was seriously that weird.

WHICH: is why I have respect for established bloggers and journallers such as yourself who seem to be adept at taking the crazies with a grain of salt -- mostly because I'd be so sad if all my favorites gave up as easily because then what would I read when I'm supposed to be working?

And with that, I shall return to working.


# posted by Blogger jam : 4:44 PM  

 A little late in getting back to answer your question, but I take thousands of photographs a month and burn discs of those. Most of those do not wind up on my Flickr page. But in terms of whether I use Flickr for personal use, I get confused because I'm not certain what other type of use there is. I personally use Flickr to catalog my favorite shots and to share them with friends, family and fans of my various blogs/online journal and to add them to Flickr pools and the like. I think the majority of Flickr users are doing so for "personal use," so that would explain their need to tag things the way they want to.


# posted by Blogger Lobstar : 11:49 AM  

 Thanks for clarifying. You use yours for storing your personal, favorite photos, and I use my hard drive for that, so you need to tag yours for your own reference, and I don't need to do that with mine.

Again - please excuse me for not considering that you and others might use tags that way. And thanks for your perspective.


# posted by Blogger Gwen : 3:45 PM  

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