4 Things On A Stick

As an amateur shutterbug, I have been a member of Flickr for some time now.

The photos of the Eugene, OR library are gorgeous - me so jealous, me envy you long time! It was also very heartening to see libraries embracing change rather than begrudingly accepting reality. I already touched on the Library of Congress project in a previous post. The "add a note" tagging idea by St John's is an excellent idea. (I'm curious about stats as to how many patrons actually used this feature.)

The photo I uploaded from fototakerspain perfectly illustrates my point about the potential downside of online photo sharing. The photographer posted a 2 tone Photoshopped shot of an attractive female minor who happened to be at the Eugene, OR public library. It was added randomly to a collection of library photos for seemingly no reason whatsoever except for, I assume, that's she's easy on the eyes. That's all well and fine. But consider the cautionary tale of a co-worker of mine at the coffee shop I work at. She posted photo and video online of her getting her hair cut because she had not done this in quite some time. Within 72 hours, multiple creepy fetish websites tailoring to the desires of men who want to watch young girls get their hair cut had linked to her photo and video feeds. Common Craft didn't mention this sort of thing in their handy dandy little video. So maybe "antique" albums and frames aren't so old-fashioned after all.

That said, Flickr is by far my favorite photo sharing web site on the Interweb these days. I used to use PhotoBucket years ago but Flickr has amazingly only improved after being bought out by Yahoo! Yahoo remains the McDonald's of the online world, but that's why Bill Gates wants it after all.

Finally, I would like to add that the difficulty of successfully uploading a photo from Flickr begs another discussion in of itself about copyright and the new Creative Commons "copyleft" movement. I understand the artist's need to not get ripped off, but we need to balance this with the ability to comment on other people's work on our own terms.