May 17, 2012

Flickr or 500px – which is better?

Adrian / All posts, Photography / 0 Comment

Flickr has a history as another great start up that was gobbled up by a giant (Yahoo!) and then systematically ruined by its parent. The first time Yahoo! added it’s logo to Flickr I knew it was a bad sign. Yahoo! is one of those companies that seem to have a mountain of talent at their disposal, but without any sense of direction.

In the past couple of years the photo sharing world has been changed by Facebook, Instagram and even Tumblr. People share their photos with friends on Facebook their mobile snaps on Instagram and blog on Tumblr.

What’s the point of Yahoo!?

To make matters worse 500px is courting a lot of photographers with its fresher service. Where did it all go wrong for Flickr?

It went wrong a while ago, when they seemed unable to get to grips with mobile photography. The service has not changed and in a rapidly changing world not moving forwards is going backwards. It’s a harsh but simple truth.

So why bother with Flickr?

I still think, for the more advanced photographer wanting to photograph more than todays lunch it’s still a great place to post your images. The Pro subscription option is great value. Very recently a couple of updates have been made to the uploader and increasing the size of the single images.

But where are the cool mobile apps – the iPhone is the number one camera on Flickr!

So while Flickr is frozen, seemingly unable to change 500px has come along. It’s unique selling point is its portfolio feature. Flickr has nothing like this, but other than that I think that many people are too generous about 500px. For a start it’s not supposed to be a dump for those twenty photos of that event you went to last week, 500px is all about your ‘best shots’. That’s a much more constrained philosophy for photo sharing. 500px has some quite irritating features such as its annoying ratings system, the inability to view large images (without paying to download them) and tacky features such as ordering prints. Yes, I do think it’s tacky and for a service that is courting professionals I think that’s a feature that appeals to amateurs. And surely if this is for professional photographers you would be able to customise your page more? I don’t mean with naff logos, but to hide tacky things like having your photos rated. Also, the portfolio page can be quite slow to load.

So there is still a lot going for Flickr although they have failed to inspire mobile photographers with a decent mobile app or to offer a proper portfolio feature.

Which is the best platform of these two?

If I was a professional photographer I would self-host my portfolio for public viewing and use Flickr. For amateur use the 500px portfolio feature makes sense but I don’t really enjoy uploading my images to its service. There are just too many things that don’t make sense. The stories concept is great but I found myself wanting to upload images to help describe those stories, and those pictures were about adding to the story but they were not great images in themselves. How frustrating that it has not been thought through so deeply.

Both Flickr and 500px work well enough, although they do different things. Think about what you need and take your pick.

May 16, 2012

The best questions

Adrian / All posts, Content Strategy / 0 Comment

Sometimes you have to ask those questions and they are often the best ones. Why am I doing this? What is the purpose of this? How can I do this better?

And looking at my website I’m asking those questions and getting to grips with the nature of the content … what I’m saying and why I am saying it. I’m also taking a good look at this site’s format and how it’s altering the way I’m thinking about content for it.

Having selected an attractive Pinterest-like responsive grid theme my mission was to populate the home page and experiment with the different content types. It’s really easy to add external content (links) and images to give the impression of vibrancy and dynamism. But this is just ‘likes’ to other peoples’ stuff … and I’ve always wanted my site to be more than that, to be about my own content and ideas.

As a result I’ve changed to a new theme (which is in essence another experiment) dispensing with the visual grid. Of course if I want to have the visual grid of ‘liked’ images I’ve got my Pinterest account for that.

Format – or should I say design choices – radically alter our perception of content production. One format might promote a strong visual look, while another focuses on written text. The truth is, in a designed world nothing is an accident. These things are how they are because they’ve been made that way.

May 16, 2012

Form and content

Adrian / All posts, Content Strategy / 0 Comment

I get unusually excited thinking about the problems surrounding form and content. I can’t help it, that kind of thing just happens to fascinate me. If I was an artist I would be iterating the same object dozens of times over, each time doing something slightly different. I have an interest in permutations and variations on common themes. This is very much what printing photographs in an old fashioned darkroom was all about. You have the same photographic negative being used to create variations, each print is a unique interpretation.

Multiple variations on common themes allow us to see how a change of emphasis can communicate something more effectively one way or the other. Printing a photo, for example, is much like being a conductor with an orchestra – we are making an interpretation of the work.

And the same is true of content and digital communication. Each time we are creating content we are giving our best interpretation that fulfils the primary objective of the organisation. Not only this, but the space in which that content is being show is also an interpretation of how and what that content needs in oder to be best communicated.

Working with my blog, experimenting with new themes and so on, has really brought it home to me how form and content are intrinsically meshed together. The design fundamentally affects the content in obvious and more subtle ways. The space the content appears in not only literally acts as a container but over time it enforces the perception of what the content will be like. The design modulates the content’s potential. It influences the direction content goes in.

In a nutshell: if you have a crappy space you will be more likely to have crappy content.

It’s not just a case of quality through. The form or format will influence what content you pick out and share. In the classic WordPress blog for example regular posts updates will be encouraged, this subliminally points towards news items updated to a schedule. I think the tendency is also for classic ‘blog text’ type posts.

In the grid theme below the format completely dictates the content experience, which has been tailored to suit visual updates or short form status updates and quotes. The idea of producing a long form blog post has completely gone out of the window. There isn’t even a way to click on a link to go to the Single Post page. The grid view here is the end content experience. It changes everything.

This is not to say that such a position is either good or bad. It’s just a reminder that form – or to be more explicit, the design – informs what kind of content you will have in the longer term and how it will be consumed.

May 15, 2012