as a continuation of my post on 360 and "user narrative" , i thought that i would jot down a few thoughts on what kind of structures 360 might use to encourage users to build and borrow narratives.

more than anything else, 360 could use a tagging system for blog posts.

such a thing offers the opportunity to create a public venue on the top navigation bar, and give incoming users a sense of activity on the site while also providing an inkling as to the types of things people are sharing and writing about. that public venue could be a combination of 'hot topics' and some human editor collected content .. giving a good overview of some of the more interesting things going on around 360 in a neat little package.

of course, tags are also a way to help people quickly find an old blog post.. but that's a secondary concern.

thinking about secondary concerns .. on flickr, tags are primarily for personal organization but serve the secondary purpose of creating vast public collections. there is also the contacts system, which is primarily a subscription system but also doubles as a filter for privacy permissions.

doubling up like this is a good strategy because it means that the user gets more for doing less, and reduces the cognitive overhead of managing multiple systems. some flexibility is lost, but simple user activity is more heavily rewarded.

 'interest lists' are underutilized and easily dismissed on most of the social network sites, so it might pay to ask how interests can be made 'dual use'.

say 360 incorporates a tag/topic system for blog posts {something that it should have anyway} 360 could treat interests as the basis for a watch list. if i'm interested in 'spongebob squarepants ' and i want other people to know it, i might also be interested in reading blog posts about the little spongey guy from other 360 members. put a "make a blog post about this interest" link on the interest's page to jump start the system. then i'll read the posts and so will the other people with that interest on their watch list..

.. and if you get a bunch of people who are interested in a topic reading and commenting on each other's thoughts on that topic, you've created many new opportunities for making contacts and possibly the kernel of a community.

{of course, i don't know whether 360 is looking to create communities for members beyond connecting existing family and friends .. also, there isn't a 'tag' for "i broke up with my boyfriend last night" so this has a limited effect on dairy blogs, a very important type}

okay, so this is going to be the kind of self-indulgent psycho-tripe that i'm sure you're all so very interested in, but i'm going to post it, and post it here instead of flickr because .. frankly .. fewer people will see it here and i'll be that much less embarrassed.

so, as you probably already know if your reading this, i'm a pretty active fellow on flickr .. and that's, you know, cool.

the thing that makes this post worthy for me is that lately i've been on a big long trip around the states. again, if you're actually reading this you may have heard of it. striatic does america. for those of you who haven't, i travelled all about the united states and met with loads of flickr people, primarily in large meetup type situations.

anyhow, on this trip i became very connected with A LOT of people from flickr, and very much disconnected from the site itself. in doing so, i learned a pretty profound thing:

i could really care less about flickr.

i haven't been posting much since then, despite access and more time than i usually have on my hands.  i'm sick of photos and photography. i'm more interested in posting video and experimenting with alternate mediums on flickr... however,  i've found that the people around me aren't really into that so much .. and bless them for that .. but i'm bored as hell with flickr.

so here i am, blessed with a good number of good friends {and some really great friends} .. and thoroughly bored out of my skull with the venue with which i connect to them.

not that flickr sucks or anything.

my first instinct upon being bored out of my skull was to consider alternative venues. smugmug or my livejournal or a standalone blog or even, yes, yahoo 360.

toying with the idea of these left them thoroughly inadequate from a purely technical aspect, or they hindered community .. or none of my friends would visit .. or whatever. flickr is good at all these things and very good and useful and all but ..

i'm sorry flickr, it isn't you .. it's me.

that said, the past couple of days have drawn me back a bit and i don't like it. old habits die hard and it'll take some time to knock this one over. however, the one thing that is consistently damp is my desire to upload anything.

one problem was that this trip revealed that i am really NOT a photographer, or even that interested in photography as a vehicle for expressing myself. i was always travelling with someone with a better camera than i .. someone more excited to shoot than i .. and more often than not i ended up the subject rather than the shooter. i kept on thinking more about the shots i couldn't or shouldn't take than getting exited about the ones i did.

so i'm bored. my problem, not flickr's. not even much of a problem really.

but still, something i'm putting out there.

so, that's all for now, until ..

*next time on as the flickr turns .. ENNUI! ANGST! PRETENTIOUS METAPHOR and striatic's love hate relationship with his icon!*

so, the other day a journalist dropped by flickr central asking folks how they dealt with digital picture overload.

since i am obviously a pre-eminent expert in this field i emailed her with  my willingness to discuss all things photoverload-ish .. these are her questions and my insanely long, overly detailed response.

RE: coping with photoverload 

Thanks so much for replying to my query! Here are my main questions, and I
may need to follow up by phone if that's OK too.If you'd prefer to do it all
on the phone rather than answer these in email that's fine too, just let me
know how to reach you.

--Please tell me a little bit about yourself: what is your full name, how
old are you, what city do you live in, what do you do for a living?

--About how many pictures do you have on your hard drive and/or online? Over
what period of time have you accumulated your image archive? How many do you
add each month? How does that compare (approximately)to the number of
pictures you took before you got a digital camera?

--Can you describe your particular strategy for managing your pictures?

--How does having so many more pictures change the way you think about
photographs? What is gained by the switch to digital? What, if anything, is
lost?

thanks so much,

Amy Harmon

New York Times

...and my bewilderingly long response:

my full name is Bryan Partington.

i'm 24 years old and live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada where i am a
freelance videographer and editor. for the most part, i make educational
videos.

offline, i have one hard drive with around 8000 photos on it from the
last year or so, and another hard drive with about 3000 photos from
before that.

online, i have a little over a thousand photos. these have all been
added over the past year. each month, i will upload around 100 photos.

i've had a digital camera for over five years now. i started doing photo
projects to upload to my website at that time. after a few projects and
five or six rolls of film, i knew that using a film camera wasn't
adequate for what i was trying to accomplish online, so i purchased a
digital camera. within the first few months of use, i had shot nearly
600 photos. keep in mind that this was five years ago when memory cards
were very small. i remember remarking to my friends that the digital
camera had already "paid for itself" compared to film purchase and
developing, and saying that they should look at digital cameras for
themselves.

now i have a camera with an even larger memory capacity and it can shoot
in a rapid fire "burst mode" that generates nearly 5 times the number of
photos that my old camera would. i'm glad i learned how to organise my
photos back when the camera limited the number of photos i had to deal with.

storage capacity becomes an issue, both on the camera and on the
computer. i've upgraded my camera to a 512 mb card. i've purchased an
additional hard drive just for my photos. fortunately the cost of memory
has dropped drastically and digital storage is increasingly inexpensive.

i use a very simple but very effective strategy for managing my photos
once they are on the drive. i use the standard windows upload tools and
sort the photos in folders by date, starting each folder name with the
month and day of the photos inside it. when i first started organising
photos i tried labeling the folders by "event", giving each a unique
name. this quickly became a huge mess, because it is very difficult to
remember the name of an event a months later. another thing i do is add
the letter "c" to the beginning of any file that i edit and upload. that
way, when i look at a folder i can easily tell which files are online
and which are not by sorting them alphabetically.

this is a very rudimentary system which simply helps me roughly track
down photos on my hard drive, and see which ones are online.

i do most of my complex sorting only after the photo is online and in
flickr. once a photo is on flickr i start adding tags to it. there are
some basic tags i add to every photo. i add a tag for whether the photo
was taken indoors or outdoors. i add a tag for whether the photo was
taken during the day, or at night. i add a tag for the city or region
the photo was taken in, and often the street it was taken in. i add a
tag if the photo is in black and white.

flickr allows users to apply tags to multiple photos at once, which
makes this a lot easier than it might sound.

after these easily definable "default tags" are applied, i will just
look at the photo and start to free associate.

i add a tag for the "genre" of the photo, whether it is a landscape or a
portrait or a still-life or something abstract. i add a tag for the name
of any person in the photo. i add tags related to the mood or emotion or
general colour of the scene. i'll add a tag for any definable object
within the photo.

these tags generate pages like:
flickr.com/photos/striatic/tags/night
flickr.com/photos/striatic/tags/outdoor
flickr.com/photos/striatic/tags/toronto
flickr.com/photos/striatic/tags/newyorkcity
flickr.com/photos/striatic/tags/erin
flickr.com/photos/striatic/tags/blackandwhite

then i can combine tags in searches like:
www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/search/tags:indoor,newyork...
www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/search/tags:outdoor,newyor...

giving me all my shots indoors in new york city .. and all the shots
outdoors in new york city

i'm sure you get the idea. tagging consistently in the way i do makes it
extremely easy for me to narrow down a search and find a very specific
photo very quickly.

there are programs that allow you to tag and search photos right on your
hard drive like picasa or ACDsee and many others. people often use a
similar tagging strategy to mine using these pieces of software on their
hard drives.

i've tried these other systems on my computer, but i find that flickr
works best for me. flickr also lowers the amount of time i spend tagging
photos because i am only tempted to upload the "good shots" to it, so i
don't waste much time tagging the things i likely won't care to see
again. some people upload almost everything they shoot to flickr, and
some people prefer to tag absolutely everything right on their hard
drive. it's all a matter of where you are comfortable doing the
organisation and how much time you are willing to spend.

although tags are a good place to start, there's no sure fire method
that will work for everyone... no one program that will magically solve
all of your photo organisation woes. you need to find a system that
works for you, using tags that you can easily remember and are easy to
add. keep in mind that if you create an system that is too complex or
time consuming you probably won't want to use it at all... even if your
system is well structured and thorough, it is useless if it is too
difficult or time consuming to keep up over time.

having so many photographs has definitely changed my outlook on what
photos are all about.

before getting into digital photography i thought of photos as something
that chronicled important events. in a way, part of what signified the
importance of an event was the presence of a camera. now, there are
cameras everywhere. i don't want to get too pretentious here, but there
are a couple of ways to look at it.

one is that there aren't really that many "cherished" or "sacred"
moments anymore. the other is that any moment can take on those qualities.

personally, i lean towards the latter point of view. still, you lift
that camera up in front of your face and you're putting up a bit of a
wall between yourself and your environment .. or the people around you.
at least with film you could only erect a barrier 24 times per social
setting. with digital sometimes you have to be careful not to wall
yourself in for the duration.

anyhow, if you'd like to contact me to clarify anything or to ask more
questions or whatever you need, do not hesitate to call me.

I've always liked LiveJournal, but despite my fondness for the irreverence of the people there i'm not surprised that many people consider it to be a bit of a goat.

"2: a victim of ridicule or pranks [syn: butt, laughingstock, stooge]"

it is fitting then, that LiveJournal's mascot is  a goat.

i too think of LiveJournal as a kind of goat, but not in the derogatory sense. i like think of it as an agile creature, nimble .. content to be more than somewhat culturally isolated up on its lonely peak.

what i find incredibly ironic is that  now everyone else is trying to scale that peak, the one that LiveJournal scaled a very long time ago... to which it has been so elegantly adapted.

LiveJournal is the "urtext" for the social networking/blogging zeitgeist.

the fundamental appeal of services like flickr or wallop or 360 is something i like to describe as a "hit engine".

a "hit engine" is some kind of update page or notification system that drives traffic to frequently updated pages. a really good hit engine recognises that the people doing the posting are often the people doing the visiting and will attempt to lower barriers between the posting and notification areas.

LiveJournal has had a very potent hit engine and has had one for a long time. email notification for comments {you can even reply to the email from within the email body text} and an early adoption of RSS are solid components of its hit engine .. but the most important aspect of its design is the friends page .. accessible with one click from your blog page, displaying the full text of your friends' posts.

long before upstarts like flickr and the rest started getting noteriety, livejournal had a slew of dedicated users in an active community... unique and potent memes .. wit .. humour .. along with all of the angst and  shameless attention whoring that  has earned its more well known reputation.

there's a certain honesty to that, one that i can respect.

LiveJournal got the fundamentals right, it'll be interesting to see where the rest take it from here.