Sea Houses
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
I’m still messing with the traditional nibs and India ink. This is a sketch for something I will finish this week.
On a slightly different topic, I’d like to (formally) say that I’m losing interest in flickr. This sketch reminded me of the things I used to post there for the sketchbook swap. Flickr is a fine service – great for folks who are actual photographers, or don’t have blogs (there are some very clever people using flickr as a blogging platform). It’s saved me from two hard drive crashes. And, I still love the tagging of content. Initially, flickr was something I was using to draw people to THIS site. And then I become more interested in various flickr communities – they work brilliantly well. And now, I’ve returned to using it as something to bring people to THIS site (and, honestly, back-up photos).
Flickr is owned by Yahoo. M$ wanted to buy Yahoo. Yahoo could change its terms of service at any moment. Facebook does this – it happens. What if flickr is no longer profitable for Yahoo (Flickr IS profitable at the moment)? I occasionally stumble across someone who was booted off flickr, sometimes with no explanation (and I don’t mean that they were in clear violation of the community guidelines). So, I found a free utility that’s allowed me to download my photos – I’m up to over 13,ooo at this point. I would hate to loose them due to a loss or profitability or service terms changing or randomly getting the boot.
So, what then?
I made a Cravistan to manage inspiration photos – it’s a simple application that works pretty well for a single, private user. It’s not really the best alternative, but it address one of the things for which I use flickr (inspiration management). WordPress is a good alternative to Flickr – it has so many essential features built in already – and there are a lot of great photo blogging themes already available. Something to consider – keep your content on your Web site.
I’m not actually dropping flickr altogether – just writing about something I’ve been thinking on for a few months.
