bikes and things

I wrote a little while back about how one of my photos went a little bit crazy on Flickr. It was a misty iPhone shot and it got over 9000 views in a day. I thought that was pretty good at the time. I also commented at the time about how it was almost inconceivable a few years back for me that an iPhone shot would be uploaded to Flickr by me.

Now it’s not me saying I’m amazing, I’m not, and this was just a shot of some mist and being there at the right time. What does surprise me is that quality of the camera in the iPhone and how much I didn’t actually miss my proper camera.

So since that I’d had another shot be quite popular – another snap I’d taken whilst waiting at a set of traffic lights in the car – with the handbrake on obviously and not breaking the law for a photo.

It was reasonably popular on Instagram so popped it onto Flickr whilst bored in the post office queue or something. It’s the same kind of thing – iPhone + VSCO + right time = popular photo. That got 60+ favourites and 9000+ views.

So again I was bored and thought I’d add something to my Flickr page. There’s a need to keep it fresh and I hadn’t sat down to edit any photos for a while. So I chucked this one up and went to bed.

I mean this really is a snap in every sense of the word. When I uploaded the square version of this to Instagram I cropped out my friend from the left. It’s also quite badly composed.

I didn’t add to any groups or try and draw any traffic to it at all. It then went stupidly crazy. As of checking now it’s had of 71,000 views and 270 favourites! It went to the top of explore and stayed there all day which is completely bonkers. Just to re-iterate my original point, I’m not blowing my own trumpet. This is a very average shot I’m just intrigued by what is popular on any given day and how things rise up in Flickr’s Explore page.

This is my stats graph for the day after it got into Explore.

Two days worth of 50k+ views on that picture and the rest of my stream. That’s nuts. I had to turn notifications off as my phone was buzzing all the time. And to prove it all here’s it’s position on the Explore page and what else was interesting. The other thing is that my three most viewed photos are now all iPhone shots which again is madness in my mind considering what I used to think of phone shots.

I used to love tumblr. It’s been an incredible resource for amazing Architecture and I’ve loved creating the pastebook and keeping it up to date with lovely images. I also loved how easy it is to spin up a site.

Got an idea for a site? Got a funny parody that’s of the moment? Sure, no problem, create a new site, pick a name and off you go. If it lasts, pick a domain, point it at it. Achieve world fame then profit?

But then it got bought by Yahoo. All the nerds and hipsters were worried. But then Marissa Mayer was there so it would be ok. Generally day to day it has. The app has continued to evolve, the web interface continues to get nice tweaks and things seem to be ticking along nicely. But then some fucking arsehole decided that they would start sending emails to their users twice a day. To all those loyal users who check the app in the morning, lunch and evening. The same arsehole or collection of arseholes (collective noun?) decided to give those emails some pretty crappy headings too.

Awesome stuff from the people you follow. Here’s what happened this week on your dashboard!

PS. FUCK OFF!

PPS. I KNOW I FUCKING LOOKED AT IT THREE TIMES A DAY.

On your marks, get set, scroll!!! tumblr. Explore what’s trending on Tumblr.

PS. YOU STUPID IDIOTS, I DONT FUCKING CARE.

PPS. YOU USED A LOWER CASE T FOR TUMBLR THEN A CAPS T FOR TUMBLR IN THE SAME BLOCK OF TEXT YOU DICK WADS.

Your dashboard is literally on fire!

OH GO AWAY.

This is the kind of thing you expect of Google Plus not Tumblr. What’s maddening about this is that they must have the ability to see who is engaging and who isn’t. I am was engaging and yet they still send me these stupid fucking emails begging me to be on their site more. Stop it. Each time I get one of these emails I flick to the left, delete and think less and less of Tumblr. I want to spend less of my time on their site, invest less of my time there and so on. Why pester the people you already have on board? Please T(t)umblr grow up and stop being so needy.

I’ve tried to use this place as a reason to write slightly longer form discussions or ‘articles’ about things that interest me recently. My view of what this place is changes often but for the large part it’s a journal of sorts and a place to record thoughts and images. It seems like a good exercise to flex your brain slightly and construct a longer discussion, or series of thoughts, as opposed to the notes form I often create at work for the purposes of communicating information in a succinct way.

Thinking back to how I got better at photography, I only got better by doing more of it. Writing is clearly the same and MG Siegler has started writing 500 words a day for this very reason. The reason I’m blathering on about all of this is that I found a great article on Technovia this morning on the bus which spurred me into writing about it. Especially this quote from the article.

But there’s another reason to write, and I think for most people it’s the most important reason of all. Writing helps you understand yourself. It forces you to focus your thoughts and move them from the massively-parallel way that your mind works into a kind of linear order. The process of writing something down turns it from a fleeting thought into something much more concrete.

When you write for this reason, it doesn’t really matter if anyone else reads. What matters is that you have written something that’s more than a single thought.

It’s great to find articles like this and it’s the whole reason I still am a heavy user of RSS. I find things like this all the time when I’m in an idle moment. I’ve added the Technovia feed to my list of essentials in Reeder.

I got a tweet last night from Petra van der Ree letting me know that Architizer had featured the Architecture Pastebook as one of their 20 best Tumblr blogs to follow.

It’s great to be featured although the way they described my posts is ever so slightly odd. But I don’t really mind as they push a lot of traffic around. It’s also worth saying why I started it and I wrote a post about that when I started.

Architect and photographer Andy Matthews from Peckham, England, fills this Tumblr with images that he finds in his research or on design sites. It is a high-quality batch of fairly straightforward building documentation.

I guess they could have said something about my love of brutalism and concrete but it’s still nice to be featured. I woke this morning with a lot more followers on Tumblr which no doubt means I’d better make a bit more effort with it and post some original content (with attribution) and up the quality a bit.

Thanks for all the followers Architizer!

Unfortunately my favourite photo service, Everpix, shutdown recently. They kind of mucked up their business model and couldn’t get enough revenue in to keep the lights on. There was plenty of discussion of why they got it wrong, their business model and why Apple didn’t buy them. Anyway, they closed and I stopped getting my favourite daily email with photos from the past.

Fortunately a service called Picturelife has sprung up to fill the void. They spent a long time by the looks of it on sweating the little details as Mathew wrote about recently.

This gives a really nice impression when you install, create an account and start uploading your first pics. It’s then easy to configure a daily or weekly email digest and it seems a little smarter than Everpix in picking out faces to show you. The iPhone / iPad app will also send you a push notification each day if you want but I prefer the email. This is the kind of email I get each day. It’s nice to have a little blast from the past although I really need to tidy up my photos as those little snaps of receipts and the odd screenshot clutter the whole thing up.

There’s lots of other features which i haven’t explored. A lot of them allow you to share photos privately instead of Facebook etc but I’ve not really investigated it yet. I normally print out photos on Photobox and post them to people instead. The web interface is nice and subtle too.

And the downsides? Well apparently it chews up a load of HD space through a cache issue which will hopefully be fixed soon.

Update three: WOAH! Spent a panicked few moments after clicking the above Backup button trying to figure out why my machine was bleeding disk space. I watched 6GB trickle away as Scratch Disk Almost Full message popped up all over the place before a friend (Ta Tim) at 54B helped discover that Picturelife creates a full image cache of your iPhone image library in User/Library/Picturelife/Storage/Images.

That and I don’t like the non-standard buttons. But on the whole it’s a great replacement and their business model seems to have more legs to it – i.e. paid.

I stumbled on this interesting article earlier via Mathew’s (With Associates) new blog*

Clusterfuck is military slang for “a chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment”. We use it fairly specifically to mean communications failure caused by too many people in charge of, or weighing in on, a particular thing.

It’s great to see someone blogging about business practices like this and considering, and talking openly, about how these things could be simplified. Read the whole article but the other line seems particularly pertinent.

Email threads and the ability to CC everyone on Earth are a particularly fine source of clusterfucks.

It seems like this might be easier for fresher industries like those that work with the web but unfortunately I can’t imagine the construction industry ever considering their process in this detail or talking about it openly. More is the pity.

*interestingly you should also read Mathew’s post of why he started blogging when the party is apparently now over .

A great article from Frank Chimero on all those sites we all check all the time (and why I deleted my Facebook). There’s so many great quotes in this but this encapsulates it best. Read the whole article.

I’m pretty good at juggling, but I feel split and overwhelmed, because these networks are sorted by what things are (a photo, video, snarky quip, etc.), rather than who made them. My brain works in the opposite way. It’s people first, so I don’t think “I would like to see photos,” I ask myself, “I wonder what Josh has been up to?” To find out, I have to visit each little silo and piece the story together. So, if you’re like me, you speed through and develop an uncourteous stance toward it all, because the stuff you really care about gets mixed in with a lot of accompanying bullshit.

Via @dyntr

Somewhere someone does something bad…

..and then the Twitter storm begins. Very funny and pretty accurate in most ways.

Funniest thing I’ve seen in a while on Twitter. Whilst I love Instagram I do tire of it in equal measure, especially all those fucking hashtags. There should be a limit of two per image.

Via @utterben

OMG the cat video went viral!

It does also explain how you see stuff in your feed once then a million times later as different groups all catch on.

Via & © @megpickard