Wow how exciting!!!
Hairy Potter took this photograph and put it on Flickr, asking for help in identifying where it was taken.
Roger B went off hunting and came back with the answer which he posted on Flickr here.
Hairy Potter used to live in Sheffield but now lives on the West Coast of Canada. He is part of the Sheffield group though and I guess it is nice for him to keep in contact with the place through the people who post their Sheffield shots there. After several meetings of some of the Sheffield Flickr Group, we have now set up a blog!! (Yes, I know …) which is here.
So interesting .. it all goes to strengthen the idea that we thicken our social relations through our online activities, and vice versa. (Guy wrote about it.) And he even gave a link where you can dowload the whole of Benkler’s book on networking.
Just one more litle point … when I met a few people from the Bristol Flickl group, one of them talked about how she hated it when people joined the group and ’spammed it’ with photos of all the tourist places in Bristol, and left again without contributing to the group at all. Fascinating really that there is a sense in some of the ‘place based’ Flickr groups of the LOCAL and that people are keen to get a community feel from it. It is not just ‘another group’. Popular groups on Flickr have people who really strongly interact and for them the other groups are not as good. The personal is crucial in all of this.
So Roger B and Hairy Potter - I reckon they are friends from way back in time when HP lived in Sheffield.
It’s great to hear of a few success stories here. It just goes to reinforce the potential the internet offers us in so many different ways.
Comment by Chris Best — April 22, 2006 @ 12:18 pm
You can’t get much more touristy than Paris and some of the Flickr groups there do suffer from 1) monument photo overload; 2) few or banal comments from tourists or wannable tourists. However, I think the parisiens seem to be generally understanding and are operating their groups at two levels - general and specific. (For example several arrondisements have their own group; Musées parisiens; Bestiaire parisien; Paris, la nuit; Paris noir et blanc…) Parisphile that I am, I’m a member of several of these but am aware of being very aware (!) that I could easily spam the pool with tourist photos and contribute very little to discussion. I’m just too sensitive.
I did visit recently, though, with the express intention of helping augment the pools of the Bestiaire and 5e and 6e arrondisements. My advice to Flickr Folk in touristy places is to expect and welcome tourists and just keep on making their local group(s) better and better. We’re all still inventing usage of the internet after all - I’ve been suprised what the Sheffield blog can add to an already busy Flickr Sheffield group.
Anyway, glad to be illuminated about the thickening social ties thing which I find to be very true. Back to Paris (yes please) and I’m very interested at how connected I feel to a couple fo Flickr Frenchies after fairly minimal contact and even more so to one we met up with.
But who are you?
Comment by Karl — April 24, 2006 @ 12:26 pm
Interesting karl; you have made me think more carefuly about how people can use Flickr to help them feel even closer to a place and to learn about in a different way. That is they can take their tourist shots and also then see them live with the shots taken by the people who live there - so that people are seeing the place from the two perspectives. We often wonder, as tourists, how the locals feel about the place and flickr allows these insights.
Comment by Administrator — April 26, 2006 @ 9:12 am