If You See a Purple Bike: Smile, You May Be on Flickr Bikes

Lifehacker.com writes about Yahoo’s Purple Pedals campaign, part of their “Start Wearing Purple” campaign. I haven’t dug into it enough to see what’s the point of the larger campaign (but I’m considering mothballing all my own purple clothes for the duration — just to be sure there’s no suggestion that I’d “start wearing purple” at some corporation’s behest).

What it is: Purple bikes around the world with Nokia 95 GPS-enabled cameraphones and software that takes a picture every 60 seconds and uploads it to the bike’s Flickr account. Lifehacker’s explanation is much more straightforward than Yahoo’s videos.

All the Flickr images from the different bikes seem to be tagged “ybike.” Seems to be the only way to find the collection of bikes. Oddly, the images are dated but the only place to find the time is in the camera’s exif data.

Flickr HQ

The ones I looked at from Flickr HQ’s bike (which I found by randomly looking at images tagged ybike) had been viewed little or not at all. But then the most recent photos seem to be from the bike just sitting in an empty office. Mroth, where are you? Wander in front of the bike and wave, will you?

Maybe the timer needs to be linked to a sensor so it only snaps when the bike is in motion?

UPDATE 9/18: Oh, rats, they went and deleted all the empty office pics. Not in keeping with the image of the Flickr staff as working night and day to improve the Flickr experience for their users?

Photography Workshop: Nobody’s Interested in Flickr

It helps to get out in the real world and get a reality check.

The participants in the Santa Fe Workshops and the Maine Maine Media  Workshops have in common that they’re dedicated, enthusiastic photographers. In addition, several people I met this summer and last were professional photographers or educators in the area of photography and media. And virtually none of them had heard of Flickr; and none were using it.

Of the nine other people in my workshop this year (seven other students, a teaching assistant, and the instructor, the latter two of whom are professional photographers), the instructor has a Flickr account with no public photos and one contact; one student has a Flickr account he hasn’t uploaded to in a year; the rest had never even heard of it.

People wanted to stay in touch after the class. When I suggested a Flickr group, they were adamant that it had to be private, they didn’t want anyone else to see their images. I set up the group and posted four images. So far, one person has posted two images, from her Santa Fe workshops.

The one who hadn’t uploaded in a year said: “I tried Flickr but got discouraged because everything seems to get lost in the scrap. There are people out there who don’t edit; they just upload their memory cards.”

Last year, in Maine, I had more opportunity to talk with people in other workshops, and never found anyone who had even heard of Flickr. When I described it to my classmates, no one could imagine ever wanting to use it. One said he had enough images to keep up with; why would he want to see even more?

I and most of my students travel in a very limited world where almost everyone we seem to know participates in social media. But that’s definitely not the world at large.

A caveat: apparently the target group for the Santa Fe workshops is the 45-65 crowd; largely a matter of cost, I’m sure. Maine is trying to widen its scope (changed its name from “Maine Photography Workshops” to “Maine Media Workshops” and has workshops aimed at young people and/or video and film), but I had little contact with the younger crowd. (The one young person I talked to a lot, a teen-ager housed next door to me, was taking, of all things, a black and white film darkroom class.)