15 April 2005
Blogging and Flickr photo sharing getting Irish press coverage
Bernie Goldbach has a posting about the recent Irish press interest in blogging in general and in the Flickr photo-sharing service in particular: IrishEyes: Flickr Ireland. Flickr integrates well with blogging software, and supports explicit tagging that enables aggregation and aggregation and distribution of items via RSS feeds, and is thus popular amongst bloggers. There is a real on-line community of Irish bloggers emerging. This community identifies itself in a number of ways:
- via the Technorati irishblogs tag in their syndicated blog postings and Flickr.
- There is an Irish Blogs portal based on aggregation (this site is selective in its definition of what qualifies: "We decide whether or not a site is Irish based on a range of factors. We do not wish to disclose our extremely complex algorithm's for determining Irishness.").
- There is a blog aggregator Planet of the Blogs, RSS that exports a single RSS feed and subscribes to a number of feeds (this site is more open about its definition of what qualifies, c.f. Damien Mulley's post).
- There is a Yahoo! Groups group irishblogs, RSS.
IRISH-TIMES -- Daybreak reader John McCormac pointed out to Irishblogs that Robin O'Brien Lynch (ROBL) extends Caoimhe Burke's 15 minutes of fame in an article explaining Flickr to readers of The Irish Times. "There are lots of theories and ideas as to the reason for Flickr's immense popularity," says Caoimhe Burke, a researcher in multimedia at DCU. "Essentially it is the most user-friendly photo-sharing service online, but it offers far more to its users than online photo storage.
"The communities that the service facilitates help to ensure its popularity among existing users and add a unique dimension that serves to attract new members.
"Admittedly it probably has more of a trendy image than other services. the service was conceived and developed by a group of young internet enthusiasts (take a bow, Stewart and Caterina) and has become the service of choice amongst the young and hip."
ROBL postulates "the most important of all the factors is Flickr's appeal to bloggers." Add to that Flickr's open API.
ROBL observes, "More often than not, a blog will carry the phrase 'view my Flickr' rather than 'view my photos'. As blogging becomes more and more popular in the mainstream, it is carrying Flickr with it to ever-increasing exposure."
"Bloggers are attracted to Flickr because the service provides tools that are specifically used for uploading images to blogs," says Burke in the Times article.
Did you know there are groups on Flickr for Ireland and Irish blogs? Isn't it a shame that the tag word "Ireland" does not rank among the top 150 most commonly used tags by Flickr users? Gold star for the person who correctly identifies the most frequently tagged Irish county in Flickr.
Robin O'Brien Lynch -- "Flickr of personality behind website's success" in "Technology" section of The Irish Times, April 15, 2005. More coverage in the Irishblogs Yahoo! group.
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