Earlier I was reading a blog post by Alexander McCabe on how people are starting to determine someone’s credentials by how many google hits their name gets:
http://www.centralquestion.com/archives/2006/02/a_google_nobody.html
It’s interesting how technology is changing the way we do things, find out about things, etc. I just realized today that flickr can be a great local news source. Well, at least for pictures of local news.
Today I was down by the local mall just after an SUV had driven through the local bookstore show window, into the cafe there. I go there all the time so it was pretty shocking to see a vehicle sticking halfway out of the store. I didn’t have my camera on me, so when I got home and told my wife about it, I tried going on line to see if any news sources had covered it. Nothing. The store itself had a mention of it, but nothing else anywhere that I could find.
Then I realized that there were dozens of onlookers snapping away with their cell phone cameras. So what are they going to do with those pictures when they get home? flickr them, of course!
Went onto flickr, searched for “Porter Square”, sort by most recent, and instantly had a dozen photos, along with commentary by people who were there.
If you want to see the pics:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/koranteng/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/viewsnortheast/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingswept/
(Nobody was killed, 3 people hurt, hopefully not too bad.)
I realized the same thing a few months ago. I happened to be going by the boston common around halloween when people had put out hundreds of jack-o-laterns. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me so I simply looked on flickr the next day. Lots of people had pictures up for the event.
yeh but how do you sort those hundreads of photos; like I don’t want to see each and every photo someone made with his new cell phone; how do I still make sure I didn’t loose anything?
“Search photos”
It’s interesting to see how innovative technology changes the way we do everyday tasks that we thought would never change. It’ll be scary once people get more accustomed to video phones.
you can only search if you know what are you looking for. that’s fairly reasonable for most of stuff on the net. newz, however, are no longer newz if you already know about them.
humans have limited bandwidth, and increasing its consumption by trying to stuff in thousands times more information is not a way to go; you’ll end up missing other stuff while browsing hundreads of whatever-relevant-or-not images.
Wouldn’t you say people turn to the “newz” to find out more about something they already know about?
no, not really… I can see how flickr helped you to get photos of event you knew about. It’s just that my mental image of “turning to the newz” is more like asking a question, “what’s up” (or “what’s new”), rather than “what’s up with that car I saw visiting a book store yesterday” (coz there’s definetly nothing new about that… I mean, why didn’t you just come and ask how many people got hurt, etc, while actually being there? if you haven’t any need in that information at that time, why would you look it up in the net afterwards?).
I see your point, but I think you are beating the semantics of this to death and missing the entirety of what I was talking about in trying to assert your definition of “the newz”.
Obviously I’m not advocating logging on to flickr every morning and sifting through millions of photos to see what’s going on in the world.
The point is that that I wanted photos and information about a small local event that no news source covered, and I was able to easily find that information on flickr. This is something that would not have been possible a few years ago, so I thought it was cool, and I will now think of flickr when I want to find out about other small events that news sources may not pick up.
I have tried googling for “bookstore accident site:flickr.com“, and it doesn’t work miracles. So the reason why you haven’t found it anywhere is that top SEs are still too far from being perfect 🙁 EU is going to build something new, so let’s wait to see if they can change things to better.